


Flash Point

by EldritchMage



Series: Logan and Rachel Osaka [6]
Category: Wolverine and the X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 11:29:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4018054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EldritchMage/pseuds/EldritchMage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hi, all. Welcome to Part 6 of my Logan/Rachel Osaka series. For all you Wolverine berserker buffs, this one is slice and dice. He's the best there is when he's pissed off... and today, he's really, really pissed off.</p><p>The first time Weapon X went after Rachel, it used Logan as the bait to snare her. This time, it's the reverse -- Weapon X thinks that holding Rachel captive will force Logan to come back to the program that put the adamantium on his bones and the scrambled eggs in his brain. Along the way, Weapon X intends to turn Rachel's particular blend of empathic skills and martial arts expertise into the perfect assassin. Who'd suspect a five-foot tall, hundred-pound woman of anything the least bit dangerous?</p><p>Weapon X is about to find out just how dangerous their would-be assassin is.</p><p>Have at, guys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flash Point

**Author's Note:**

> X-Men and the names of the X-Men characters are trademarks of Marvel, Inc.
> 
> Rachel Osaka/Omen, Daniel O’Shea/Daemon, JuliaMarch/Feeder, and Keshe/Stillness are my characters and are completely fictional.

You know what I hate about comic books? Fancy-schmancy graphic novels? They’re nothing but hack fests. Slice and dice. Murder and mayhem. Now and then, you get a lush, airbrushed still from somebody’s wet dream, some big-titted babe covered in more blood than clothing, screaming her last under the hands of a monster. Lotta adrenaline-soaked, teenaged fantasies from frustrated artists who draw sex rather than do it. Makes me want to puke.

It ain’t like that. I back up every second in a fight with hours of planning, waiting, thinking –

What, you think a guy like me doesn’t think?

Didja get that from comic books, too?

– SNIKT –

–

Sonofabitch. Real pissed off right now. In fact, pissed off doesn’t begin to cover it. Lemme pull in the claws and start over.

–

No macho bragging this time about the Wolverine. And no shit about normalcy. As much as I’ve tried to pretend that my life is normal – it’s anything but. Comic books – oh, excuse me, graphic novels – make it look like nothing but rippling muscles and flowing hair and noble posturing. They might talk about the sick stench of blood, but the pics make even the splatters look good. Artistic. When they bastardize the few good parts of my life, add some pretty lighting and pneumatic cleavage and a few bottles of premium beer… you think the nastiness is something I can handle.

I can’t.

Not even with Rachel around.

Rachel Osaka is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. We forged a strong bond for people who are so different. Go read the stories. She’s beautiful, smart, and sexy in a way that has nothing to do with the size of her breasts and everything to do with how she carries herself. When she graces me with that private smile, calls me her samurai, I get to thinking that maybe I have a shot at a real life, one past the slice and dice, one where I can forget about what I do best.

So it’s obvious what the assholes in charge of my karma would do to put me in my place, right?

They gave Rachel to Weapon X. To the bastards who crucified me on that X.

Do you hear the universe laugh? Do you smell the blood start to rise?

The hack fest is about to start.

 

* * *

 

_Two months ago…_

 

I had been asleep for an hour or so when I heard the tapping again. I’d heard it last night, but hadn’t figured out where it’d come from. It was too loud tae be a mouse, and despite what you may have heard about New York City, wee rodents didnae infest every building. The outside of my loft might be an old warehouse built well back in the previous century, but the inside had been completely gutted and replaced five years ago before I’d moved in, and I hadnae seen a whisker. I was on the twelfth floor, which I admit was no deterrent tae a determined and hungry mouse, but I had my own special ways of scaring the beasties off. My loft holds more computer power than many countries, and the last thing I wanted was tae offer a plate of wires as a main course tae anything with gnawing teeth. As soon as I’d gotten settled, I’d put in motion detectors, sonic devices, and a handful of other special toys tae urge the vermin tae go elsewhere.

Tonight, I wasnae under siege by wee rodents. Tonight, the vermin was human.

My name is Daniel O’Shea. You know me though my friends Rachel Osaka and the formidable Logan, a.k.a. the Wolverine. I’m a mutant, as they are. The technical description of my talent is that I can pass an electrical data stream over my cerebral cortex and interpret it directly, without mechanical intercession. What that means is that I hear the data sing. I call tae it and coax it tae tell me many a tale. I make a handsome living as a data miner, analyst, and researcher.

I’d stuck tae business applications of my abilities until I met Rachel. She came tae me with a pretty problem – her lover was a cursed man who dragged more baggage behind him than the ghost in an old English Yule tale. Unlike the greedy Mr. Marley, however, Logan hadn’t generated all his baggage himself, unless you consider his unique mutant abilities tae be what the law calls an attractive nuisance. Several North American military organizations thought that his healing abilities, his animal senses, and his habitual aloneness made him the perfect candidate tae be a super soldier, which is what they set out tae make of him whether he agreed or nae. The baggage from that had built for close tae a century, and made Logan a continuing target. It also tended tae target anyone Logan cared for, and as much as he cared for Rachel, it was inevitable that she would catch his harriers’ eyes. I hae no love for overbearing governments and their abandonment of ethics when they treat with their enemies. Call that the result of my Scottish heritage and its entanglement with old English imperialism. Call Rachel’s situation an appeal tae my highland stubbornness tae honor a just cause, hopeless or not. I started digging into the shadowy world of Canadian-American military shame.

The stories came over the aether in a rush, begging tae be told. The depth of the hubris, the arrogance, the contempt for human life… Debate may rage whether mutants are abomination or evolution, yet all but the most vehement agree that mutants are human. Weapon X didnae suffer from such an opinion, and the number of tales that sang dirges of mutants kidnapped, coerced, tortured, forced tae undergo horrific medical experiments, even murdered, was staggering. Weapon X had no more redeeming virtues than the Nazis who had scourged the world in the 1930s and 40s. As a true Scotsman, my zeal for the true cause was ready tae take on the challenge to undermine such a pervasive, entrenched, and well funded institution, whether Rachel was my friend or nae.

Perhaps tonight I would pay for entering such a fight.

The tapping started again. I reached for the data port under my pillow, eased it into the jack at the base of my right ear, and let the sentry apps feed me their tales. Something was scratching at the window at the far end of my loft – something my size. I wasn’t about tae find out what, face tae face. I eased out of bed, climbed atop the chest nearby, and stretched up tae the metal superstructure eight feet above my head. It was little effort for someone as comfortable as I am on a mountain face, but I took pains tae climb up without sound. Once I’d gone aloft, I triggered a security app. Then I triggered the lights by the window as I crawled behind the ductwork.

I peeped around the ductwork just as the lights failed. That didn’t matter. I have a form of albinism that’s most noticeable in my white hair and skin and red eyes. It isnae a mutant trait, but it was useful now because I see better in the dark than I do in bright light. I love the outdoors, though bright sunlight can blind me painfully, even with the darkest glasses I can find. But in the twilight of computer screens, of city night, which is never completely dark, I see quite clearly, and I quite clearly saw two human shapes ease through the opened window. That scared me. As I said, I’m twelve stories up, and if these two men were adept enough tae scale the building without trouble, they were likely competent tae make haggis out of me, too. As if tae reinforce that thought, one of them pulled a body bag behind him, I assume tae get me out of the building if they found me. I kept still in my bolt hole.

As they started tae rifle through my equipment, though, I swallowed anger. A lot of my life is in those bits and bytes, and I didnae like thieves anywhere near them. Fortunately, they didna get far in their search before my security app simulated the police pounding on my door. The two intruders fled through the window, taking nothing with them that I could see. Once they were gone, I climbed down and did a quick run-through of things. All the screens were blank, but my key log told me what they’d been looking for.

OSAKA. WEAPON X.

I picked up my cell phone and called Rachel. Her phone was off, so I left a message. Then I called Logan. His phone was off, too, so I left another message. Finally, I called Charles Xavier. He, at least, was answering his phone. Once I warned him, I sat down and went to work.

 

* * *

 

I’d gotten a call from a new client late yesterday afternoon, not much before I was going to leave my antiques shop in a fashionable part of New York City. It’d been a long, difficult day. Two of my current patrons were very wealthy clients quite willing to spend lots of money on period English items, but both I and my assistant had had our patience and tact stretched to the breaking point with their constant, unreasonable, and frequently conflicting demands. I hadn’t been eager to see anyone else yesterday and had set up a meeting for very early this morning before anyone else would be in the shop. That would give me the quiet to focus on Mr. Fowler and his interest in Hepplewhite chairs and still allow him to make a business meeting scheduled for eight, just an hour from now.

Mr. Fowler’s voice over the phone had been casual, chatty, so I put on black velvet jeans, a red cashmere sweater, and a grey tweed jacket – all things I could move in. Thank my time with Logan for that. Even my boots were supple enough to climb rocks and sticky enough to preserve my balance on anything other than ice. I headed out of my apartment and found a seat on the subway train to my shop.

I had brewed tea by the time Mr. Fowler rapped on my front door.

“Ms. Osaka?” he inquired with an ingratiating smile.

“Please come in,” I smiled, offering him my hand. He took it without hesitation, and I let my mutant talents pick up what they would. I’m an empath, and I have an odd collection of time sensing abilities. When they first manifested, I would pick up details of where an object had been in the past hour or so. It was scary and unpredictable, so I’d soon learned not to touch people because it bombarded my thoughts. Once I learned to manage my talents, I could draw a line between someone else’s emotions and my own. I’d even learned how to pick up many things even without physically touching a person. Given that I’d run afoul of some of Logan’s worst acquaintances, that skill had saved my life and his several times.

The sneaky habits of the bad guys meant that I always scanned strangers with everything I had so that I could walk away from trouble before it started. Mr. Fowler was no different. His handshake was firm but not committed, short without being too abrupt. It was also very, very neutral. Superficial, perhaps, but that might mean only that antiques weren’t his burning passion. I took the sensations under advisement, and led him into my small office to chat.

He accepted a cup of tea with bluff pleasure and came straight to the point about his interest in a particular kind of shield back chair. I listened, letting sense of his emotions further define the depth of his interest.

There was no depth. He didn’t care at all about a set of chairs for his dining room table.

At a tactful moment, I leaned forward. “Mr. Fowler, I’m curious. You certainly know your Hepplewhite, but I’m not sure that I can track down the pieces that would satisfy you. Are there other cabinetmakers that might be of more interest to you?”

Mr. Fowler chuckled. “You know,” he said, pointing at me, “you’re very good. Exactly what I’d heard. No, Hepplewhite chairs aren’t what interest me at this point. To be honest, Ms. Osaka, I’m much more interested in you. I think you and I have a lot to offer each other.”

His emotions seemed to confirm his words, taking on none of a business bent and everything of a personal nature. I got up and made sure that I got to the door of my office before Mr. Fowler left his chair.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fowler, but I don’t mix business with pleasure. I think you’d do better to find a dealer who is better suited to your particular needs.”

“I’m not interested in a personal relationship between us, just a professional one between you and my company. Maybe I can give you an incentive to hear me out. You have a proven set of skills that mesh very well with the talents of my organization, and we offer a support system to let you do anything you want, wherever you want.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, and I sensed two people at the back door. But I didn’t let on.

“What organization might that be, Mr. Fowler?”

He smiled. “You know us as Department H.”

I bolted out of the office and nearly careened into Fowler’s two cohorts who’d slipped silently into my shop. I ran over one before he knew I was there, and I pulled an antique, silver-handled cane from a stand to thrust it at the second. I made short work of Mr. Fowler as he tried to come up from behind, and landed blows on all three as they struggled to gather themselves. Another two came in through the back entrance, and these were better prepared, one with a trank gun. A few expensive British antiques didn’t survive the impact of the bodies I downed. While they tried to untangle themselves, I grabbed my purse and fled out the front door. I was already reaching for my cell phone as I sprinted down the street towards the subway entrance.

A cab drove past me. I didn’t see anyone coming after me yet, so I whistled the cab down and piled into the back seat.

“The police station on Seventh and Broadway,” I panted, as I turned on my phone. There was a message waiting for me, but I didn’t have time to hear it now. I keyed 911 and pushed Send on my phone...

Everything greyed out. I never pushed Send.

 

* * *

 

“C’mon, darlin’,” a faraway voice graveled. “You’re comin’ round hard, but you’re comin’ round. Take a sip of water.”

A hand went behind my head. Another held a water bottle to my lips. I was too groggy to do anything but sip, but gradually the grey lifted. Trees rose above me and grass lay underneath my hand, albeit harsh as fall-dried scrub can be. Clouds scudded on high, nothing heavy, but enough that the October sunlight was sporadic.

“Better, darlin’? Take another sip.”

Logan. That was Logan’s voice. I sat up all at once, took in the clearing around us. I couldn’t place the spot. Maybe it was the woods behind the Xavier Institute in Westchester.

“Easy, Rachel. Take it easy. You’re safe.”

“Where are we?” I rasped. My throat was so dry that it hurt. When I winced and put a hand to my neck, Logan handed me the bottle he’d held to my lips, and I took a big gulp.

“Doesn’t matter. What does is that you’re safe.”

“Weapon X.”

He nodded. “Yup. You did a bang up job on the five in your place. But the sixth was the cabbie, and he dosed you with somethin’ airborne before you got to call anyone. You managed to hit your GPS thing, and Xavier put me on to it. Didn’t take me long to track ‘em down. They had you in a car headin’ north, and I caught ‘em once they hit rural roads. You’ve been out for a couple of hours.”

I felt like it. My head was full of cotton, and my throat still hurt. I winced, but I set my talents loose despite my headache, and looked at what they told me.

Odd. I didn’t get any sense from Logan. No smell, no time sense, nothing. Then I realized that I didn’t sense anything around me at all, only things far away. This must be what non-mutants felt. Such emptiness… it’d been well over a decade since I hadn’t sensed the tales my talents gave me, and the sensation was creepy enough that I abandoned any desire to be anything other than the mutant I was.

All at once, my brain cleared, and more things stood out. Logan had mentioned my GPS device – I hadn’t triggered it. And him telling me that I was safe was another miss. Logan had never, ever told me I was safe. He knew we rarely were. I met his eyes. He gazed back at me just as he would…

Just as someone else thought he would. Unless you knew him, you’d never know when something other than his usual wariness shone in his eyes. He wasn’t demonstrative because that wasn’t in him, and given our talents, he didn’t have to be around me. We had our own code of scents, heartbeats, emotions, touches that said all that we needed. The sappy expression in his eyes wasn’t part of it.

Nothing was wrong with my talents. They told me that what my eyes saw wasn’t anything but a picture. TV. Holographic simulation.

Logan’s eyes narrowed. “You all right, darlin’?”

“What makes you ask?”

“Heart rate just shot up.”

Someone was monitoring my vital signs. And they had this very convincing holographic simulator. Oh, God…

I got to my feet, albeit unsteadily because my heart was racing and my body trembled. The Logan avatar got up, too, still staring at me. I met his eyes, but didn’t speak.

“Rachel, what’s wrong?” He put his hand on my arm.

I took his hand, just to make sure that I still didn’t sense him. Not a trace of anything – no scent, no pheromones, no emotional feedback, no sound of his heart or breath. Only my eyes and my fingers thought he was real.

I let his hand fall. Even the largest holograph projection field had walls, and I set off through the woods to find them. The Logan avatar was right on my heels.

“What the hell are you doin’?” he growled, but I ignored him until he took me by the shoulders and turned me around. “Rachel –”

I shrugged him off and kept going. I clenched my teeth to trigger my implanted GPS signal.

“Turn it off,” the Logan avatar growled.

He wasn’t real, but he glowered like the real one, and the light in his eyes looked feral. I backed away and tried to remember that I likely wasn’t going to die in this encounter, because someone wanted me for something –

They blew it by having their Logan avatar backhand me to the ground, then pop its claws.

“Turn it off!” it shouted, pulling back its arm.

“You’re not real!” I shouted back.

I didn’t feel the grey fall.

 

* * *

 

The next time I awoke, there was no illusion of a forest or Logan. I was propped up in a steel chair in what looked like a prison interrogation room. My neck was killing me because I was slumped over in the chair. I must’ve been slumped like that for some time. Was I tied to the chair? No, my wrists and ankles were free. I was still dressed in my clothes from this morning I didn’t feel bumped or bruised …

As I shifted in the chair, my arm hurt inside my elbow. Someone had given me a hypodermic injection.

I couldn’t suppress a groan as I tried to raise my head. My neck was very sore, but it I leaned my head against the back of the chair.

“Miss Osaka?”

The voice was soft, male, concerned, but not cloying. The face that met my eyes once I got them open was young and earnest. He was probably not much older than I, tall and handsome, in military fatigues – American Army military fatigues. Ominous, that. The Weapon X program that had harried Logan had been a Canadian operation. Had it expanded over the years to collaborate with the American military?

I let my talents go. What I saw was human this time, backed up with a heartbeat, respiration, and emotion. That concerned expression on his face was almost genuine, but it was more the concern for a valuable thing rather than for another human being. Logan had told me about this kind of game. This man was probably the good cop sent to appeal to me before the bad cop showed up.

I checked my GPS signal. It was still on. I looked for a video or audio hookup, but didn’t see anything obvious. When I felt able, I rose out of my chair and circled the room, running the standard sweeps that Logan had taught me. The young man watched me in concern for a moment or two.

“Miss Osaka,” he tried again. “I know you’re confused and disoriented right now, but I’m here to help you. I can explain things if you’d let me.”

I wasn’t stopping him, so if he wanted to talk, that was fine with me. I ignored him, and kept on with my scan. I tried the door, and was surprised to find it unlocked. I swallowed, but decided I had nothing to lose by seeing how far Weapon X was going to let me go. I opened the door.

A featureless hall stretched in both directions like overwrought stainless steel kitchen appliances polished to perfection. A doorway loomed at one end of the hall, so I ventured that way. The earnest young man trailed behind, looking so uncomfortable that I could’ve nominated him for a film award.

“Miss Osaka, if you’d just let me explain,” the man said, gently taking my arm as I approached the door. I looked at his hand on my arm, then reproachfully at his face. I shrugged off his arm and kept going.

“My name’s Devon. You’re in a safe place near Chicago. There was an attempt on your life.”

The door at the end of the hall was unlocked, so I went through it. But the door on the other side of the next room was locked. The room was empty, so I ignored Devon to retrace my steps back to the room where I’d awoken. I picked up the chair I’d been in, went back to the locked door, and hefted it in my hands. Devon was very upset when I pounded the chair on the door until I managed to punch a chair leg through the glass window, making a hole big enough to slip my hand through. I groped carefully for the knob on the other side. To my surprise, I got the door open. That’s when I looked around suspiciously. Maybe this was a simulation, even though Devon was real…

I turned my regard on Devon, narrowing my eyes on him until my talents made his emotions shine around him. Given that a lot of his concern seemed to be real, I decided he was probably a junior level operative who didn’t know the real game he was in. He probably thought that the story about an attempt on my life was the truth. Around him, though… I got no sense of anything real.

“Which way is out?” I asked him simply.

That flustered him. “What?”

“Which way is out?” I repeated.

“Miss Osaka, as I said, there was an attempt on your life. We brought you here for your safety –”

“The only attempts on my life have been instigated by your department. Now, which way is out?”

When he started to sputter again, I turned back to the door I’d opened, and went through it into another hall. I shut my eyes and let my senses carry me forward, my hands outstretched before me as I walked slowly. Sure enough, the instant before I touched the wall, I felt that tiny, almost imperceptible tickle of energy that I’d come to know in Professor Xavier’s Danger Room. This was a holographic simulation. I let my senses unfurl again, straining them to their sharpest, and I followed them slowly back and forth, Devon trailing helplessly behind me. When I opened my eyes on an apparently vacant wall back in the room where I’d awakened, I knew that before me was the control panel for the simulation.

I looked back at Devon. He had a pistol on his belt. I turned towards him, and kept my body calm until I was close enough to lash out at him. I had his pistol before he had sprawled on the ground. Then I aimed the pistol at the supposedly blank wall and fired.

It took a couple of shots before I hit anything vital. But the hall faded to a featureless grid fast enough.

“That was stupid,” Devon growled, looking a lot less innocent and a lot more threatening. Maybe he thought that would make up for me embarrassing him in front of his superiors.

I went to the control panel and pressed all the buttons. Eventually one opened an access way. As I expected, a troop of men stood outside to keep me inside. Devon came up behind me and took back his pistol. I didn’t resist. I could have emptied the remaining bullets into seven of the soldiers, but it wouldn’t have mattered. There were more than seven soldiers around me, and they had more guns.

“You should’ve worked with me,” Devon growled. “It’s going to go a lot harder with you now.”

I didn’t tell him that he hadn’t said anything unexpected. I didn’t tell him that he had a shred of decency about him, and if I’d shot him, I would’ve regretted it, and doing so wouldn’t have won me my freedom anyway.

I wouldn’t hold back when they sent someone worse, someone I wouldn’t regret killing.

 

* * *

 

The soldiers surrounded me and hustled me out of the holograph projection room and into a standard interrogation room. I was put into a chair on one side of a table. Three men sat opposite me, two in military uniform, and one in civilian dress. All three were real, and all three regarded me with varying degrees of patronization. As the soldiers who had carried me in filed out, I scanned the room quickly. There was at least one camera port that I could see, and probably others. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all stainless steel. The grate in the otherwise featureless wall probably hid at least an audio port. When the last soldier filed out, a panel slid shut and the room seemed to be a hollow, seamless cube worthy of an agoraphobe’s dream.

“Ms. Osaka, I’m sorry your arrival here and initial treatment were fraught with such trauma.”

I considered the civilian who’d spoken. He almost looked at the soldiers sitting on either side of him, and he almost glared, and the soldiers almost looked contrite. But that was the story they wanted me to believe. I might have, if my talent hadn’t seen the lies in their emotions. I didn’t reply, but I looked at him skeptically and crossed my arms in front of my chest.

“We know you’re broadcasting your location as we speak. It’s not necessary, but I understand if you prefer to let the signal continue. We’ve already relayed your location to the federal and local law enforcement authorities, as well as to Professor Charles Xavier via the Ministry for Mutant Affairs.”

I didn’t believe that, but didn’t say so.

“The truth of the matter is –”

I tilted my head at him, my eyebrows raised.

“The truth of the matter is that we need your help. I apologize for the manner in which you were brought here and the misguided attempts to mislead you. This department isn’t used to such straightforward situations, and it’s behaved rather badly. Let me get to the point before we strain your credulity any further.

“It’s come to our attention that you are acquainted with a man known as Logan.”

He paused, but I saw no need to comment on something that was already known.

“You know that he’s an operative for the Canadian Secret Service and several foreign governments.”

I didn’t react, just kept my regard as neutral as I could make it.

“What you may not be aware of is that Mr. Logan has recently sold his services to the front of a faction that presents a serious threat to national security. We believe he is unaware of the nature of the group behind the front men with which he contracted. We must intercept him as soon as possible to apprise him of that threat, and to allow him to remove that threat.”

Logan was a contradictory man. He’d done some horrible things. He’d had a lot of horrible things done to him, many by Weapon X. He’d failed a few supposed tests of honor that I hadn’t thought worthy of the name. He’d often been a silent hero, too, even as he groused like a cranky old man. I’d seen him spend hours on a computer scoping out possibilities, connections, alliances, motivations – many, many more than I’d seen him fighting, though the latter is certainly what people remember of him. There were a few things about the US he hated, from its self-indulgent and ignorant fringe groups to its arrogance overseas. But as much as he disliked America’s weaknesses, he cared too much for his adopted country to betray her, and he was smart enough to find out who was behind the people he did business with. Weapon X, of course, tried to convince me otherwise with many twisted facts and innuendo, and in such persuasive tones that I might’ve doubted Logan if my empathic talents hadn’t revealed another picture. What made me curious was why Weapon X would go to all the trouble to deceive me. But I was patient, and expected that this trio of liars would get around to that eventually. I hoped I’d be able to handle it when they did.

“…so you can see, Miss Osaka, why we’re interested in any means possible to intercept Mr. Logan. That’s where I hope you can help us.”

Here it was. I maintained my neutral expression, but inside I braced for the worse.

“It’s been noticed that you and Mr. Logan seem to have… a rapport.”

I wasn’t going to help them with that.

“You seem able to communicate with him on a non-verbal level. Perhaps some sort of telepathy. That’s remarkable given his psychic blocks that generally prevent such communication.”

If they meant that Logan wasn’t subject to their mental manipulation, they were right. Maybe they thought they could use my empathic rapport with him, but that was problematic for several reasons – I had my own psychic blocks, and my empathic abilities couldn’t influence Logan to do anything he didn’t want to do. I stuck to my neutral expression.

“Time is of the essence here. We believe that you can reach out to Mr. Logan far faster than any other channel can, and to relay the needed details to him quickly. We’d also like you to accompany him during the operation to keep him apprised of the latest developments.”

I thought fast. Did they think I could get inside Logan’s head? Did they think that if Logan met me that he’d be easy to catch? What if I showed enough interest to agree to this, and when they let me out of their cage, I’d run as far as I could in the other direction? What if I rejected the whole thing and they kept me here? Logan would find out about my disappearance eventually, and he’d come after me, whether I wanted him to or not, whether it was a danger to him or not.

I was in over my head. I looked back to the three men and tried to fathom what to do.

The officer on the left, Abington, stared at me. The look on his face… maybe he hated mutants, or Japanese, or women, or maybe just mutant Japanese women. Maybe it was something else. But he bore me only malice, and when I met his eyes, he flinched as if he’d lost his last flimsy reason to tolerate me. Maybe he thought that just meeting my gaze gave me power. Whatever the reason…

I made it over the table and grabbed his hand before he got the pistol leveled at me. It went off, and I felt a searing pain across my calf, vanquishing my defensive intentions in a surge of cold fury. I smashed his nose into his brain and crushed his windpipe before he could bring the pistol to bear again. As he flailed gasping to the floor, I grabbed his pistol and leveled it on the remaining soldier and the civilian, reading as fast as my talents fed me.

The civilian was still recoiling, but the other soldier had drawn his pistol and was about to point it at me. I shot it out of his hand.

“Both of you take off your coats and shirts. Now!”

Both complied.

I pointed at the officer.

“On the floor, Major Evans.”

He did.

I pointed to the civilian. “Take his shirt and tie his hands and ankles behind him. Do a good job of it.”

He did.

“Take your tee shirt off, civilian. Then lie on your belly. Hands behind you.”

He did. I kicked his knee so hard that he hurt too much to resist when I pulled the tee shirt over his head to blindfold him and tied his elbows behind him with his shirt. I wasn’t civilized about it, and his tendons and ligaments didn’t like the strain. But that’d give him something to think about other than trying to trip me up. Then I grabbed the trussed officer’s gun.

“Civvie. Get up.”

The civilian struggled to his feet. I stuck one pistol in my jacket pocket and the other in his back.

“Open the door,” I said to the video port.

The door opened, and I poked the civilian to get him moving in the right direction.

Of course, I didn’t feet the grey fall this time, either.

 

* * *

 

Rachel called me back the next day. Her voice was as warm as I remembered, but…

Logan’s caution had rubbed off on me. I cued a tracer app because I didnae recognize the number Rachel had called from. It wasnae her shop, and it wasnae her home or cell line. I made small talk for a minute or two while the app worked.

The number was initially local, but last night had made me cautious, so I went further. And there it was… someplace in Illinois. Rachel had nae need to call from there, and she’d been in the city when I talked to her yesterday morning, so…

I didnae say anything about what had happened in my loft last night. I teased her about nae making dinner plans as we had talked about the last time we’d met. Rachel had a internal jammer that blocked electronic means of overhearing her conversations, and I was hopeful that Weapon X hadnae learned its way around it yet, so wouldnae know that we’d discussed nae such thing. And sure enough, the voice on the other end of the line went along. I sampled the voice pattern, ran it through another app, and confirmed that it wasnae Rachel’s voice that answered me. Whoever it was, she hedged making a date, and told me that she was about tae leave on one of her antiquing trips to France, but would be sure to call me when she got back. She rang off without any protest from me.

I called to the data flows that ran from my computers to my brain. What could I find around Chicago that looked like a telephone exchange but was really something else?

The electrons started to sing…

 

* * *

 

The next time I awoke, I was lying on my back on the floor of a holographic projection room. Above me, matte black walls and ceiling stretched out of eyesight. I blinked, and found a little of the blurriness clearing. My head felt heavy, likely from drugs. My arms hurt, and when I sat up and pulled up my sleeve, sure enough, I saw needle marks. My hip hurt, too. I thought the bullet had creased only my calf – it had, because my calf still burned – but maybe the bullet had creased me twice.

“Let’s play a game.”

A blond woman stood nearby, not close enough for me to tackle if I’d been so inclined. She was strange, so strange that the last of the cobwebs cleared from my thoughts. Her eyes were the oddest things, such pale, flat, café au lait brown irises with pinpoint black pupils floating in them that I wondered if they were real. Arms akimbo, she looked down at me, but I wasn’t sure if she saw me.

If her eyes were dead, the rest of her wasn’t. She had the lush hips and breasts of a glamour girl film star of a century ago, and tousled blond hair to match. She wore olive drab fatigues like no soldier did, as if her body resented such a mundane costume and preferred mink, diamonds, and nothing else.

“You were right, Cameron. She doesn’t talk much. You don’t talk much, do you, Rachel Osaka? That’s why I’m here. Because you don’t talk.”

If I’d expected the breathy Hollywood ingénue voice to go with the body, I was disappointed. Her voice was singsong, bored, and almost mechanical in its inflection. I could have been a chair for all the regard it held. Her emotions were disturbing, a mixture of detachment, fury, and lust that made me flinch. Usually, when I sense someone’s emotions, I get a sense of connection with the rest of the world. I didn’t sense that now.

“The shrinks call me a sociopath,” the blond woman said. “I call it freedom from attachment. You can call me JuliaMarch.”

She looked off to the left. I followed her gaze and saw a window with people silhouetted behind it in some sort of control room.

“She’s an empath, Cameron. Not the telepath you thought,” Julia said. She looked at me again. “Not Julia. JuliaMarch. That’s my name. I’m a telepath. A very special kind.”

I looked at her warily.

“What kind?” JuliaMarch asked. Her face was brightly animated for a moment, so I took that to be her talking for me. Then her face fell into its previous lack of expression. “She wants to know what kind, Cameron. You’ll find out. Let’s play a game so you can find out.”

The holographic projection started, showing a decaying urban alley between two rows of tenement housing. The hour was close to dusk, and the alley was damp with the remnants of an early rain. There were two pistols on the concrete between JuliaMarch and me. She picked up both, and tossed one to me.

“Come on. We’re going to play assassin.”

I let the gun fall to the concrete.

JuliaMarch cocked her head at me and smiled. “Oh, come on. It’s not real. It’s like video games, that’s all.”

I wasn’t a gamer. In fact, I didn’t even watch much television. There were too many other more interesting things to do.

“This is better than people or books or martial arts. So pick up the gun and play.”

I left the gun where it was.

JuliaMarch smiled again, but it looked like a grimace because there was no life behind it. “I didn’t think you’d play just because they wanted you to. But maybe you’ll play because of what I’ll do if you don’t. Are you sure you don’t want to play?”

I just looked at her.

This time, when her face lit up with a big smile, my brain lit up with flames. It was agonizing, a cross between fire and electrocution, but it didn’t last but a second. My psychic blocks kicked in, dulling the pain a little, and I fought to focus them against JuliaMarch’s onslaught. I’d never had to do that before, and I wasn’t very good at it. But at least I kept my feet.

JuliaMarch didn’t notice anything but my distress; she just smiled that rictus of a smile. In some sick way, she fed on my pain. “There. Do you like that? Are you still sure you don’t want to play?”

I slowly picked up the pistol. I cocked it, then brought it up and fired it at JuliaMarch. It went off, even plastered a realistic looking spatter of blood across her chest and hair. She looked down at it and turned a far-from-childlike glare on me.

“That’s not the right kind of playing,” she tsked me, and the pain started again. This one didn’t hurt as much as the first one and waned even more as my psychic blocks figured out what to do. I pretended to stagger, but in her direction; when I got close enough her, I was going to –

“Uh-uh-uh,” JuliaMarch sang, waving a finger at me.

The pain she threw at me this time was tenfold worse than what I’d felt before. I screamed, blind and deaf to everything but the searing fire in my head. Then suddenly my psychic blocks compensated, and I came out of the pain ready to fight back.

I got in three good, solid blows before the grey came.

 

* * *

 

JuliaMarch was still in attendance when I came to. She had a bruise on her cheek and a sulky expression, both my doing. She held herself stiffly, too, so my body blows had hurt her. We were in the same alley, but she and I weren’t the only humans present. Logan and a troop of four soldiers were here –

No, it was another batch of avatars. And this time the Logan avatar was as brutal as he surely was under the worst circumstances. Plain and simple, I was going to take part in this little training exercise, or I’d pay the consequences.

I know it wasn’t Logan who beat me. It wasn’t even a human, just a computer hologram projector’s sophisticated manipulation of power. But it hurt, and I didn’t need any airborne knockout drops to make consciousness fade.

 

* * *

 

The next sessions were nasty. Their sole purpose was to get me to use my talents so that JuliaMarch could prattle about them to Cameron hiding behind the control room window. Weapon X chained me into a chair and let JuliaMarch feed on my reactions. At first, they were content to expose me to objects so that I’d read them. Some of them had frightening histories. Then they sorted out my physical abilities with weapons. With JuliaMarch’s considerable talents, I didn’t have to touch a gun or a knife or a sword for her to know what I could do with them and under what circumstances. In minutes, Weapon X knew everything.

After that, they started on my relationship with Logan. I wanted them to know even less about that than my talents, but JuliaMarch stayed right beside me, her singsong voice describing everything that came and went in my thoughts. To hear her mechanical voice recite what I thought about Logan and what we did together, was the most humiliating time of my life. That was the only time they made me cry.

Once they scoped out those two things, they unchained me from the chair and threw me into a sim chamber, where things got a lot more painful and a lot less concerned with my lucidity. Sims ran almost continuously, without pause for rest or food. They tried to get me to believe that Logan was breaking me out, or that he was in danger and needed my help. Even when I was exhausted, though, my talents told me the lies around me. They kept this up for days until my sense of reality was swallowed into sleep deprivation, until I’d been beaten badly enough that I could hardly stand.

They said they’d stop if I’d just play along. No chance of that, because Logan’s memories of his own treatment had convinced me that I’d lose what little remained of myself if I complied. Of course, JuliaMarch relayed my opinion to her eager listeners. They sent in five soldiers with rubber hoses who stripped me naked and let JuliaMarch feed nearby while they thrashed me to within a millimeter of my life. I passed out somewhere in the middle.

When I came to, I was lying face down on the bare floor. One of the soldiers was talking about how useless this was given that they couldn’t beat me hard enough to kill me. That might’ve been heartening days ago, but now it sounded like the worst sentence in the world. Then JuliaMarch said there were other things to do that wouldn’t kill me. One soldier thought that was funny. Another looked uncomfortable and wouldn’t look at me. A third said he might as well get something for his trouble. So he shoved me over on my back with his boot, unbuckled his pants, and pushed down on top of me.

JuliaMarch’s feeding frenzy peaked to something unholy. The soldier’s emotions were no less monstrous. The combination punched through my exhaustion and pain and snapped the leash off my beast. Without the least remorse, I took my pain and fury, mixed it with the shark attack madness surrounding me, and smashed them back at the animals that harried me. As the man on top of me froze, I drove my skull into his face, my teeth into his throat, and my fingers into his eyes. I shoved his bloody carcass off me and let the beast explode.

It happened so fast. I killed all of the soldiers but the uncomfortable one, and got a thick handful of JuliaMarch’s beautiful blond hair before the grey fell.

 

* * *

 

Metal collar.

Strapped face down on a medical gurney.

Sharp stench of isopropyl alcohol and blood. Agony in my shoulder.

Too drugged to moan.

I open my eyes.

Colors whirl around me. Everything is flat, distorted.

I shut my eyes.

Colors burst behind my eyeballs when the collar sends an electrical shock surging through me. All I can do is spasm. My muscles ache and burn.

The zapping stops.

The straps loosen.

Someone turns me over, triggering more pain in my shoulder, wringing a moan out of me despite all the drugs.

My stomach flops, nauseated from the stenches, my fried nerve endings, and the taste of metal in my mouth.

A slap across my face barely registers.

Someone laughs that the pain in my shoulder means they’ll keep me here forever, but I can’t put the words together.

They stab a number into my arm.

So much pain.

I find a dark place.

 

* * *

 

_One month ago…_

 

I have the strangest dreams. In some, I lie strapped to a medical gurney and someone stabs a number into my arm, over and over, but it never takes, the dye fades and they curse. In one, they give up on the tattoo and put a pair of dog tags around my neck. In most of them, I’m in a sim, a game. The avatars teach me to hunt people and kill them with guns, knives, bombs, poison, my hands. So many ways to take life.

It doesn’t matter. They’re all dreams, all sims, so I drift through them without caring. The ones about setting bombs and doing recon… I do those. The wet work… I can tell when the targets are real and when they’re not. I do the sim avatar targets, but not the human ones. They think the drugs keep me from knowing the difference. But the reek of emotion tells me and I won’t kill unless I’m cornered.

That’s when JuliaMarch, Feeder, goes in my head and pulls out things. She likes to make it hurt. She tells Cameron that I know when the target is real. She makes the collar shock me and the drugs come so I play the game. The drugs are injected in that instant before the shock clears, when I’m not quite in my body, but I still feel the needles. Sometimes I bleed a lot or the needle doesn’t go in right.

Cameron talks to Feeder now. He is a terse, bored voice without a body. He directs the sims and tells the avatars to make me do things a certain way so I kill faster, with less effort. He doesn’t talk to me anymore. He used to. It made me mad. Feeder didn’t like that, because I moved fast enough to get to her. She made them change the drugs so I can’t act on my fury. It doesn’t go away, but I can’t make the effort to do anything about it. When they pretend to hurt Logan in the sims and Feeder tells me to cry, I don’t. His avatar isn’t real, so there’s no reason to cry.

Cameron is frustrated. When they don’t give me the drugs, my independent thought helps me slip away or go after JuliaMarch and the soldiers more than they can control. Cameron says how maddening that is. He says my psychic blocks are too strong for them to wipe out my personality and put in their own. He wants both physical and mental control – perfect execution of the sims with my independent thought leashed to do what they want. He yells – if you peons can’t find a way around this impasse, we’ll have to resort to a permanent solution.

The peons get smart. Now my human targets are soldiers who come after me with so much brutality that I kill them just to stay alive. But I’m a reluctant and defensive killer, not as cold-blooded as when I do the avatar targets, so Cameron still isn’t happy.

He says they’ll pull in a wolverine to straighten me up. So what? I took down three human soldiers with my hands not long ago. The military’s finest. A little furry beast won’t take anywhere near as much effort as they did. Cameron gets mad when JuliaMarch tells him that. He keeps threatening to make things worse for me, but the drugs don’t let me care. How could things be any worse? I no longer have a human brain.

The sims continue without end, trying to make me a killer. The only time I am is when they hurt me enough that my beast comes out to stop the pain. I think I’ve learned to do something differently, but I can’t remember what, just that people die. The rank fever of their emotions is a torrent that ought to make me sick. But the drugs turn what I feel into something so remote that it hardly registers. When it does… I’ve gotten past my naïve guilt about killing someone who tortures me. The next time I see Victor Creed, I won’t feel a pang when I take him down again.

If I ever stop caring enough to kill the soldiers the way I do the avatars… If Cameron ever comes from behind the speakers...

They ought to be a lot more scared than they are.

 

* * *

 

_Two weeks ago…_

 

Time passes. The drugs they dose me with now… I can’t remember one minute to the next, but I don’t seem to hurt so much now. I wake. I’m hooked up to an IV because I’m too much of a zombie to eat. The drugs fire in my veins every couple of hours. I’m herded down a corridor to a room. I do the sim. I don’t know whether I’ve done this sim before or not. It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same. Set up, move in, whack the target. Or set a bomb. Or wire a booby trap. I go to another room. I do another sim. I go to another room. I do another sim. I go to a lab, am poked and jabbed and tested. I go to another room. I do another sim. I can’t remember enough numbers to count how many sims I do before the grey finally comes.

 

* * *

_Yesterday…_

 

I wrung a hand over my face. My stomach was in a knot. My body was shaking. What time was it?

10:37 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

I’d fallen into the data stream again. The last time I’d surfaced was close tae twelve hours ago. I hadnae eaten since then, so no wonder I shook. I’d look like an ashen prison camp survivor if I didn’t surface often enough tae take care of basic input and output. I staggered for the loo, then the fridge, but I kept the data jack in. I finally had enough information tae know where Rachel was imprisoned, and data was still coming in about the capabilities of the place, data I didnae want tae miss.

Tae back track a little... it’d taken me a week tae move from my loft tae a new home, mostly at Professor Xavier’s insistence. He’d taken the break-in seriously, and so he’d arranged a new place for me. I’d been frightened enough tae agree, and so wasnae settled in the new place yet. I hadnae expected so much work tae get my equipment back on line, but such is the nature of electronic beasties. Once I got things physically moved and arranged, it’d taken three days tae put all the security in place, then placate the data and coax it tae sing again. Nailing that complex that had been the origin of Rachel’s phone calls… that’d been so tough that it’d scared me. Usually even the most clandestine facility can’t put me off but a few days. But this one had been as elusive as the Devil Himself. The security codes changed constantly, and some of the decoy protections had been furious. By the time I got my head around the problem, I had more than a casual interest in taking it down. They had my friend, they were filthier than anything I’d ever run across before, and they had plans tae steal other mutants if they could break Rachel tae their yoke. Finally, after a two-day marathon, I nailed the facility and subdued its security – no easy thing, that, and keep everyone else in the dark about it. When I had it at least at bay, I crashed for a few hours of sleep. In another two days, I’d hacked its net into Swiss cheese; another day and I’d traced all the power connections and the computer linkups.

Data was still coming in about where all those linkups went when I crawled into the kitchen for whatever was still edible after four days of inattention. I wolfed cold salmon and raw vegetables as fast as any bear and my stomach eased quickly once the protein hit. I gulped fruit juice flavored with incoming personnel records, supply requisitions, inspection results, maintenance trouble tickets... a veritable banquet of data, all from a hidden facility outside of Chicago. I rewarded myself with a big bowl of ice cream as I scanned the info. Then I cued my cell.

Damn. Logan’s phone was still off. The man could be maddeningly hard tae reach because he disdained email for weeks at a time. Rachel had told me that he’d only recently conceded tae carry a cell, and it was off more than it was on. I’d have to leave another bloody message –

Rachel’s call hadnae been from her. Someone had intercepted her calls. Maybe that’s why I couldnae get through to Logan. I broke the connection with Logan’s phone, flicked a few brain cells, and started sniffer applets.

Calling Xavier was next. I got Ororo, and quickly explained what I’d learned. She put Xavier right on.

“Have you told Logan?”

“I canna reach the man.”

Xavier mulled that. “I’m not aware of where he is, Daniel. I’ll look for him as soon as we complete our call. But there’s no guarantee I’ll reach him before you will. His psychic blocks mean that he’s able to keep me out if he doesn’t want the contact.”

“His cell may be compromised, too. I’m working on it. This place where Rachel is will be nae easy thing tae breach, Professor. Logan will need all the help he can get.”

“Agreed.” I heard a soft tsk of exasperation. “I do not understand the arrogance of these people to keep up their harassment of this man and everyone he touches.”

I laughed. “Then look tae the history of my own homeland, and ask the Brits what they can tell you about it. Some people just dinnae like it when others want tae gae their own way.”

“Of course you’re right, Daniel,” Xavier sighed. “Of course you’re right. I’ll call you back if I reach Logan.”

I rang off, and tried Logan’s cell again, with the same result. The sniffers hadnae found much yet, so I concentrated, generating the commands over my data jack that would create an applet tae call Logan every fifteen minutes. He was persistent in being left alone. Good thing for him that I was just as persistent in looking out for my friends.

 

* * *

 

_Now…_

 

I came off the plane like I usually did after a job – tired, rank, hungry, grouchy. I’d spent the last three weeks locked down in an Eastern European country I can’t name doing a job I can’t talk about. Typical scenario. It was about 4:30 p.m., and all I wanted was to call Rachel and spend the evening reacquainting myself with the joys of having a woman to come home to. So I pulled out my cell, turned it on for the first time since I left the country, and rang Rachel’s home number.

No answer. That didn’t worry me. It was during working hours for normal people, so I rang her cell.

No answer there, either. I rang her antiques shop.

Whoever answered the phone said Rachel was in Paris, on one of her semi-annual collecting trips. I could leave a message if I were so inclined.

I wasn’t. I grimaced at my bad timing and resigned myself to scrounging a meal and a place to crash for the evening.

There were two messages on my cell. I called them up on the way down to the parking garage to collect my bike.

The first was from Rachel letting me know about her trip. She apologized for the short notice, but said she’d call as soon as she got back to the States. That wasn’t like her – usually she planned these excursions herself, and they weren’t spur-of-the-moment. That just deepened my ill humor as I listened to the second.

Damned if it wasn’t for another job – some military type. I didn’t like the intrusion, but there’s a certain code of responsibility in my line of work. You don’t turn too much stuff down for the wrong reasons, or you get the wrong kind of rep. I turned off my cell – I was bummed about wanting Rachel and getting only more military bullshit, and decided I could do without any more until I’d eaten and slept. I scrounged some crummy burgers and tried not to think about the steak dinner I might’ve had with my lady, then crashed in some cheap flophouse out in the burbs. The next morning, I hauled my ass out of bed, ate, gassed up the bike, and drove a few hours to a bar outside of a military installation that nobody knew about.

The guy was late. It was after dark and I’d already won a couple hundred shooting pool with the locals by the time he sauntered in. I spotted him heading for the bar as I lined up a shot. On the outside, he was innocuous enough, a real Mr. Medium. Medium height and build, medium brown hair and eyes, standard corporate pawn uniform of medium blue polo shirt and casual khaki trousers that were as out of place in a biker bar like this as a frozen daiquiri.

Inside… that was another story. He was one of those operatives who carry themselves with the arrogance of Achilles and smell like the first faint, sweet stages of rot. I’d always wondered about the smell, had never figured it out. This one was young, a little too polished, a little too studied, a little too precise in how he carried himself. You rarely got a straight answer from a guy like that, so I didn’t like him on general principles. On top of that, there was a something unidentifiable about him that I liked even less. I stifled a growl and took my time to clear the table and collect my winnings. There were no more takers at the table, so I put away my cue as the spook made his approach.

I glanced at him. “You want a game?”

His smile was small but as smug as if he looked at road kill. “I have bigger fish to fry. Do you?”

My dislike rose, but I kept it quiet. “I go for steak more’n fish, bub. Got my own sources for that.”

“I think I can offer something worth sinking your fangs into,” the spook said softly. Again, the words were innocuous enough, but the intent raised my hackles.

“I doubt it,” I growled, snagging my beer. “But if you wanna talk about a job, then cut the spook stuff and get on with it. Otherwise, I’m gonna finish my beer and get on with life.”

His eyes flashed with anger, then he banked it behind smugness. “Good. I like a man who doesn’t waste time.”

“Then stop wastin’ mine, bub. Speak your piece or fuck off.”

His smile stayed smug, but he nodded to the door. “Shall we?”

I glowered at him, but drained my beer, pulled on my jacket, and headed outside. There was way too much going on in what I picked up from him, almost like a weird kind of sexual come on. He wasn’t gay – I can smell that – but he acted like black ops rather than straight army, which told me a lot. Black ops guys rarely did anything without a sadistic little twist that reflected more of their own internal perversions than anything else. This guy was full of something mean and scaly, so I had all my senses at full awareness as we left the bar, in case he had cohorts waiting outside to add their two cents to the discussion. But the parking lot held only cars and cycles. I got into the front seat of the spook’s car and waited for the spiel.

When he finally got down to it, the job was as nasty as I expected. It was a corporate assassination, pure and simple, and not one that left the world any better off. I’d been offered worse, but the very pointlessness of this one from official channels was unusual. It felt more like someone wanted me to jump through a hoop than anything else. I don’t take that kind of work, and I said so.

That smug smile waxed as wide as the moon above us. The sigh that followed was just as theatrical. When the guy pulled a couple of small cards out of a pocket, it was with more pleasure than a kid should feel on Christmas Day.

“I knew you’d see it that way, Wolverine. I told my superiors that even your scruples would make you turn it down. Beneath you, really, and no point to it. But I’m authorized to offer you a training bonus over your usual fee. The point isn’t for you to make the hit, anyway. It’s for you to shepherd a new operative who’s to do it. You shouldn’t have much to do, because she’s been trained by the best.”

The cards he handed me were photographs of Rachel. The first was just a headshot, and she was laughing, looking away from the camera, clearly not aware of being photographed. The second showed her on one side of a table facing three spooks on the other. Whether her closed expression was the result of her own caution or not was a matter of opinion.

All the pieces fell into place. I didn’t think; I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed that smug bastard by the throat and gave him a clear view of what he’d playfully called my fangs.

“Be careful,” the spook managed to croak before my hand closed tight. “You need me to tell you about our newest Weapon X recruit and who the target is.”

“No, I don’t,” I snarled, tightening my grip. “I just need to wipe that smile off your face before you die.”

I had the satisfaction to see that smile, that air of superiority, vanish. He gasped and clutched my arm with both hands, but that didn’t cut any ice with my adamantium or my fury.

“She volunteered!” he gasped.

“No more than I did, bastard.”

“You need me to tell you where the job is!”

There was a sport coat lying on the back seat of the car. I kept my grip on the bastard’s throat as I pulled the jacket into my lap. I found his wallet and ID, then an envelope stuffed with papers. I shook the papers loose one-handed, and the bright moonlight was enough for me to scan them. There was nothing about any assassination, but I gleaned enough to know where they were holding Rachel. It wasn’t a good place to be. I put the papers and Rachel’s photos in my jacket pocket.

“What I need is to keep vermin like you away from my woman. Congratulations – you’re the first maggot I take out of the picture.”

I clenched my hand and broke his neck before he suffocated. Then I checked him for bugs. Sure enough, he’d been miked. What a sucker. His superiors had set him up to die, because they’d known how I’d react once I saw Rachel’s picture, and they’d known I’d find the leads to Rachel’s whereabouts. Maybe he’d been a pain in their asses as well as mine. If so, then Weapon X owed me for taking out the trash. But that was chump change compared to what they owed me for messing with my woman.

“I’m on my way,” I growled into the mike before I ripped it free. Then I scattered the contents of his wallet on the seat of the car and got out.

I kicked the hog to life and headed west.

 

* * *

 

I rode through the night, too wired to sleep. I tried to keep a lid on my temper, but knowing Rachel was not going through an innocuous session of isolation made that impossible. When I stopped for gas in the middle of the morning, I switched on my cell and gave Daniel O’Shea a ring, just on the off chance that he knew something, but his number had been disconnected. That didn’t help my temper, either. Had Weapon X tracked him down, too?

There were over a dozen messages waiting for me. I paid the attendant and was about to check the first one when my cell rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was a New York exchange.

“Yeah.”

“Daniel O’Shea here. Damn it, Logan, why don’t you look at your cell now and then? I cleared the call diversion shit off your line hours ago and have been leaving you messages every fifteen minutes since then. Weapon X has Rachel.”

I swallowed a curse. “Found that out for myself last night and headed after her. Just turned on my cell.”

“Where are you?”

“Someplace in Ohio. Where are you? I tried callin’ your regular number again just a coupla minutes ago, but it’s been disconnected.”

“They came after me, too. I had tae move.” He told me where he was. “They’ve had her for nearly two months. Just outside of Chicago.”

Daniel picked up my growl, but not my subvocalized anger. Two months – they hadn’t had time to lace her skeleton with adamantium, not with her lack of a healing factor, but that was more than enough time to turn her brain into their tool. “Location matches what I’ve got. They tried to claim she was gonna ice some meat puppet and wanted me to tag along.”

“Do they know you’re coming?”

“They damn’ well invited me. What’re they doin’ to her?”

“They’re trying tae turn her into a terrorist. An assassin. She’s nae been willing. I’m sending you GPS coordinates. The place has got state of the art surveillance, both sound and vid. If you whisper, they’ll know it. They’ll know when your heart rate changes, when you start tae sweat. There will be nae place to hide. They have at least one telepath, so you may nae be able tae keep a secret, either. The one thing they don’t seem able tae monitor is emotional gradation. Rachel’s an empath, and you smell emotion, so that might be all you have tae work with.”

“What about air surveillance?”

“The best the American military has tae offer. They’ll know when you set foot within 15 klicks.”

“Are you able to pick up Rachel’s signal?”

“No. It’s either not on, it’s been disabled, or it’s being blocked.”

I didn’t like to think about why it was off or how it might’ve been disabled. “You told the X-Men?”

“Of course. They want in. So do I.”

“You won’t get close. How far did you say their sensor range is?”

“Fifteen klicks on the nose.”

I thought about that. “Tell the X-Men I appreciate their offer, but –”

“Hang on – tell them yourself. I’ve got them on the line now. Hank?”

“This is Ororo, Daniel. Logan, I know you’re pretty fired up right now –”

“That ain’t the word, ‘Ro. I’m gonna have to go in there to get Rachel out. If there’s anything left to be gotten out. They claim she’s a willin’ recruit.”

I heard a disgusted snort from Daniel. “Sod that. You know better.”

“Yup. I do. But if they’ve made toast out of her brain, I can’t slice and dice that outa my way. I gotta go in and find out what’s what.”

“Agreed,” ‘Ro said. “I’m prepping the Blackbird now. We’ll rendezvous with you within the hour. We’ll get you within 15 klicks of the place and stand by until you need us. Rachel’s our friend, too.”

I admitted that ‘Ro’s plan made sense, and it got me to Rachel faster than my bike would. “Sounds good. I’ll leave my cell on.”

“Good enough,” ‘Ro replied. “Daniel, thanks for the connection.”

“My pleasure,” Daniel replied. “Logan, I’ll coordinate your data feeds from my place. Rest assured you’ll have every one of my wee beasties burrowing into Rachel’s prison tae bring it down.”

“Matches what I’ll be doin’ on the inside,” I growled. “Thanks.”

“Dinnae thank me. This is personal, and it’s gone on long enough. If I can bring the whole fucking black ops net down, I’ll do it.”

When I grinned, it wasn’t a nice expression. “Back atcha, Daemon.”

He rang off. I got back on the bike and rode.

 

* * *

 

Forty minutes later, I was parked on the edge of a cornfield. In the distance a rumble started, the low notes of the Blackbird’s turbo jets, so I finished my cigar before the noise got too loud. The jet was on the ground less than a minute for me to haul my Harley on board, then ‘Ro headed back to the stratosphere.

In the back of the jet were Kurt, Rogue, Red, and Scott. I heard Daniel’s voice over the comm talking with Scott, so apparently they’d put the computer genius on continuous feed. He and Ol’ Red Eyes went back and forth over a lot of technical stuff, so I handed over the papers I’d taken from the spook and let them mull them over while I changed into my X-Men uniform. ‘Ro gave me a recap of what they’d learned so far, most of it from Daniel. A lot of ‘em were all for a big noise right from the get go.

“A frontal assault ain’t gonna work,” I growled, silencing the lot of them. “This ain’t some penny-ante kidnapper hideout where you can do a fast extraction and bat outa there in ten minutes. This is a military base, with the power of the US armed forces behind it. If you don’t do this right, you bring everything those bastards stand for down on the mutant population. But they want me, and they know I’m a loner. That’s why they have Rachel; that’s why they’ve told me they have her. That’s why I’ll be able to walk right in the front door without anybody firin’ a shot.”

“Valid points,” Daniel’s voice came over the com. His brogue was thick and rough with anger. “But we’ve got tae get both of you out again. We don’t need tae do a frontal assault for that. I’ve already hacked into their power grid. I’ll take it down once you’re inside. Kurt can get the rest of the team inside. Scott and Rogue can make a mess of the backup power for their equipment. Jean can open doors and stop bullets. And Ororo can cover the whole thing with some weather. We can teach them a lesson about teamwork finesse as well as how they shouldnae mess with Rachel anymore.”

It wasn’t hard to see that my friends agreed with Daniel. I was about to argue, but maybe Daniel sensed it because the com came to life again. “Bloody hell, Logan,” he snapped. “They’ve got your lover, my sister, our friend. You’ll have your shot at offing as many of the bastards as you want. I want my version of that.”

The silence hung in the jet like a blanket. It was rare that someone was so blatant about any part of my life, my privacy. It hurt. But Daniel had put his own relationship with Rachel out there, too – he was brother to Rachel the way I was to Rogue and Jube. I understood the protective instincts that having a sibling in all but blood aroused.

“What do you want us to do, Logan?” Jean asked quietly.

I exhaled. “We’re all close to Rachel, me more’n most. So if you wanna go for Daniel’s plan, you got my backin’.”

I looked around, and there were a lot of nods, even from Scott. “Okay, Daniel. We’re in.”

“Right,” Daniel said. “Here’s what I hae about what’s inside…”

Over the next hour, Daniel fed us information about the facility where Rachel was held. By the time ‘Ro gave me the high sign that we were getting near, we had refined Daniel’s plan to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Listen up,” I said. “’Ro’s settin’ down, so here’s the deal. It’ll take me twenty minutes to bike in like they want and get to Rachel – chances are that’ll be the easy part, because they’ll want to show her off. Half an hour after that, Daniel will take down the power grid. Scott and Jean will take down the backup power generators at the same time. Rogue and Kurt will contact me to help get Rachel out. ‘Ro will keep the weather nasty and the jet prepped.

“Understand that once I get inside and the power’s down, I ain’t gonna be in stealth mode. If any of those bastards get in my way, they’re gonna die. The stealth mode is just to keep what happens inside from getting’ outside.”

“I’ll hae us covered outside,” Daniel said. “Inside, I defer tae you, Logan.”

No one else spoke. I stared at the lot of them, daring them to argue. I figured Scott would, but he looked at Jean, clenched his jaw, and looked away. It was the most human thing I’d seen him do in a long time, and I respected him for understanding how I felt because of how he felt about Jean.

“Okay,” Scott said quietly, without any of his usual hung-up, anal, boss-man body language. That surprised me, and I nodded, accepting the gift.

“Logan,” ‘Ro’s soft voice called softly from the front. “The base is fifteen and a half klicks due west from here.”

I nodded. “You wanna drop the back door, ‘Ro?”

“Be careful, Logan,” Red said, and the rest of the X-Men murmured their agreement.

“Get ‘em, Wolverine,” Daniel’s voice came over the intercom.

“You too, Daemon. See ya.”

I got my bike out of the jet without a backward glance. I paused, sniffing the air, and lit a cigar. I took a couple of puffs, fired up the hog, and turned west.

 

* * *

 

In a little more than twenty minutes, I parked the bike about 400 meters outside the perimeter of a squat cinderblock building. I walked the rest of the way in. Above my head, the first threads of Storm’s weather works had clouds gathering, winds rising, temperatures dropping. The place didn’t look like much on top, but I expected that it mimicked an iceberg – the bulk of the place lurked below. I carved my way through the fence and the razor wire, grabbed a handful of rocks to toss ahead of me to set off the mines that lay between the entrance and me, and soon enough stood outside a blank steel door that was probably twice as thick as my claws.

“Open the door!” I barked, looking right at the camera. No reaction. “You wanted me here. I’m here. So open the door and let’s get down to it!”

The door, as thick as I expected, swung open wide enough for me to walk in. Behind it, two internal doors made of shiny steel bars and thick glass were interspersed down a ten-meter entrance corridor, but they opened immediately. Bet they wouldn’t open so fast when I wanted to leave. I didn’t worry about that now. I strode in, my eyes on the six men who waited beyond. All of them were big and bulky, which didn’t improve my temper. Neither did the cuffs a couple of them carried. One guy fidgeted like he couldn’t wait to snap them on my wrists. When the last door between us opened, I got right in the eager guy’s face and put enough claws through his gut to curb his enthusiasm. While he fell to the floor and bled, I ducked trank pistols and batons to slice and dice the next four. I got the last one around the throat and slammed him against the steel wall until his weapons fell from nerveless fingers.

“Where is she?”

The guy choked, so I loosened my grip a little.

“Didn’t quite hear that, bub. Speak up this time, ‘cause I won’t ask again. Where is she?”

“Let him go, or you won’t see anyone,” intoned a voice over an unseen speaker. Pretty good sound quality, so Daemon had been right about the abilities of the place. I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Cut the crap,” I snarled. “Show me what you brought me here to see before I take out my bad temper on the last of your doormen!”

“Stop it!” a female voice exclaimed over the intercom, but at a distance. Rachel? “There’s no need for this, Cameron, and you know it.” Her voice got louder, as if she were walking towards the mike. “Logan, it’s Rachel. It’s all right. Let the guard go and come through the door. I’m on the other side.”

Another door opened silently beyond the bodies. I let the remaining soldier drop without another thought, and I headed through the doors. There’d be time to ice him later if he got in my way again.

I had to pass through a few more doors before I saw anyone else. I took it all in – seamless, featureless metal that made up walls, floor, and ceiling; small video ports every few feet in the ceiling; and air exchange grids that probably hid a bunch of gadgets. I wondered if the appearance of so few people was a ruse or too heavy a reliance on spyware toys. The walls showed few scuff marks. Neither did the floor. I didn’t smell much, just a whiff of lubricating oil and air heated through computerized components (it’s got a tang I can’t describe to anyone with a human nose, but it’s distinctive if subtle). What human scent I noted was faint and didn’t include Rachel’s. Another thing to file away.

A door opened off the main corridor. I came into a room as featureless as the hall. Rachel stood inside, waiting for me. When I came in, she smiled that smile and rushed to throw her arms around me.

“Logan,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “I’m so glad to see you.”

I put my arms around her. It was hard to resist when she wound her hands in my hair and drew my lips down to hers. It was a long, long caress that would have settled a lot of my fears – if there’d been her scent to back it up. No one can bathe enough to keep my nose from picking up something, and Rachel was no exception. What I smelled wasn’t human, without a single note of Rachel in it. But I didn’t let on. I wanted to see how far these guys would play this.

“Darlin’, I’m glad to see you, too. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she hastened to assure me. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You don’t belong here.”

“I do now. I sold my antiques shop. I haven’t been able to work there for so long anyway, and I was tired of thinking about old paintings, old furniture, old people who wanted the old furniture and old paintings. So I finally did what I should’ve done a long time ago, and sold it.”

“You never wanted any part of Weapon X, Rachel –”

The image of Rachel’s fingers touched my lips, silencing me. “I wanted to be with you, Logan. That’s the one thing I can’t get away from. I… decided that nothing else matters, if we can be together.”

Some people probably thought Rachel saying that would be a nice appeal to my ego, but Rachel wouldn’t have been one of them. I narrowed my eyes. This was a sim, but a damned good one. She felt and sounded real, just… wrong smell, no life force.

“So you came here and agreed to become an assassin? Did they tell you about the poor sap you’re supposed to ice in a couple of days? He’s a nobody.”

Rachel’s image looked away, then met my gaze again. “Then it doesn’t matter if he’s gone, does it?”

“I don’t ice a guy just for bein’ a jerk, Rachel, and I’m not gonna teach you to, either. That’s what they want me for, don’t they?”

The real Rachel would’ve been a lot more embarrassed for being found out so fast, but the real Rachel would never have started this conversation, either. It was almost laughable when her image shrugged without a blink. “I thought you’d be happy to have me as a partner. You always enjoyed the aftermath of whatever trouble we got into, didn’t you, lover?”

When she whispered in my ear was something somebody thought the two of us indulged in when we were alone. Another miss. Rachel and I weren’t shy in our private pursuits, but we let our bodies and not our words speak about that. Rachel would never have wasted words on such a thing in private, much less someplace this dangerous. The violation of my private life didn’t improve my temper any, so I armed the image aside with a growl and scanned the ceiling for the vid port.

“Better holograph technology ain’t worth jack if you don’t have a clue about anything else,” I snarled at the vid port. “Now show me what you brought me here to see, ‘cause this ain’t it!”

“I don’t understand,” Rachel’s image whispered, looking frightened.

I kept my eyes on the ceiling. “Cut the crap now, or I take this place apart!”

Rachel’s image clutched at my arm. “Logan, don’t say that. They’ll hurt me if you don’t –”

I shoved her away, popped my claws, and put them through the steel wall. “Now!”

Rachel’s image disappeared.

“Impressive,” the intercom echoed. The voice sounded mildly interested, even bored. “Though it would have gone much easier for both of you if you’d gone along.”

“Deal with it,” I muttered. “Where is she?”

The door panel slid silently opened, and I went back out into the hall. I looked left, then right, and further down the hall another door slid open. I kept my curse to myself as I left the room.

When I reached the open door, I slowed, took a breath, and cranked all my senses up to their max. I edged towards the opening.

The room was empty. I didn’t go inside. Just as I found the vid port, the air thickened in the center of the room. I didn’t have to see anything other than the long blond mane before I growled at the vid port.

“You show me another sim and I’ll take this place apart. You show me that bastard in a sim and I’ll take whoever’s in this place apart, too. Now, you want somethin’ from me, but you’re going to have to give me somethin’ first. Where is she!”

The faint outline of Sabretooth faded. The door at the end of the hall opened. I went like the rat in the maze they thought I was.

 

* * *

 

Dragged to my feet. No IV. Real clothing, not sim-generated. Feels weird. Tight chains on my wrists and ankles. They hurt. I bite whoever is closest. The collar shocks me, rattling my thoughts until they ought to make noise like a rock in an otherwise empty garbage can. A couple of big soldiers impatiently haul me up by my arms when the chains hobble my steps to a few inches. I’m carried into a room. It doesn’t look like a sim room – just a square room with two doors. In. Out. JuliaMarch is there. One of the soldiers grabs me while the other rams a hypodermic needle into my arm. The fluid he injects burns like acid up my arm and into my heart. One of the soldiers leaves. Time stretches out so far that it becomes beads on a string. The string breaks and all the moments are disconnected...

 

* * *

 

In the next corridor, another door opened. I approached this one as slowly as I did the last, but I wasn’t expecting a sim this time. This time, I smelled Rachel.

Inside the room, three people waited for me. Sure enough, one was Rachel. The second was a big guy behind Rachel. The third was a blond woman.

All right, pause for a minute. When I reacted to these three, it would be instantaneous. But a lot would go into that reaction, and needs explanation.

My eyes went first to Rachel. This time, she was real, because I smelled her own unique scent, albeit unwashed. She wore a grey tee shirt and sweatpants, both too big and cleaner than she was. Her feet were bare. Her back was to me, but my hackles went up because her raven hair was lank and disarrayed out of its usual smooth elegance and her scent was nearly overwhelmed by the taint of drugs. Her heartbeat was too low, and her life force was paler – probably from exhaustion. She stood on her own, but she was lax, listless. An electronic collar was clamped around her neck. Her wrists were tightly handcuffed in front of her, and her ankles were chained so closely together that she couldn’t walk. On top of that, the big guy was pulling a hypodermic needle out of her arm. He grabbed her shoulders to drag her around to face me. They’d put a pair of dog tags around her neck. This wasn’t the first time she’d been drugged – a lot of needle marks scarred the inner crook of each elbow. Her eyes – I’ll get to them.

Next, the big guy. Nothing unexpected there. He was tall and chiseled like a Hitler Youth poster boy with a granite jaw and a blond crew cut that bristled like wire. He reeked of unfiltered cigarettes and rare steak. Nastiest kind of bully jailor, and the only thing he lacked was a leash from Rachel’s collar to his hands – nope, I stand corrected. When he capped the empty hypodermic needle and put it in a pocket, he pulled out a small thumb control to the collar around Rachel’s neck. He had a finger already on one of the buttons, begging for a reason to press it. Other than that, he wore standard fatigues but no pistol. Maybe they’d learned to keep weapons away from Rachel. When she was alert, she was the devil when it came to self-defense. Her reactions were a hair faster than human, and she could’ve gotten her hands on a pistol if they’d given her half a chance. Given that he stood out of reach and carried a baton in addition to the thumb control, I figured they’d made that mistake once, but wouldn’t again.

Lastly, the other woman. She was tall and creamy blond, lush, as inscrutable as a statue dressed in olive drab. How she wore the uniform told me she wasn’t military – no tee under her shirt, and that was unbuttoned lower than was regulation. Her hair, too – she wore it loose in soft, sensual waves. She held her body stiffly, awkwardly, as if she wasn’t quite in control of it. Her arms were at her side, but her hands were poised rather than relaxed, like a magician’s ready for the next illusion. Her eyes were the oddest things about her, unblinking and not quite real. They were too big for her head and a pale, solid brown, the color of cardboard. Those odd eyes tracked me as soon as I entered, but they weren’t focused on me. They seemed to look beyond, or maybe they were blind and her hearing was precise enough to give a good impression of seeing me. She stood off to the side, midway between Rachel and me. Her heart rate was up and jumped higher when I came in. She smelled lethal, deceptive, like a snake coiled under leaves or a land mine lurking under a light dusting of dirt.

Now for Rachel’s eyes. They glowed, but not as I remembered. When I’d first met her, they’d harbored a barely-visible, sunlit glow. As Rachel’s powers had increased, as she’d grown more comfortable with those powers, they’d kindled with a green-yellow fire that had gradually deepened to gold.

That wasn’t what they looked like now. They might be glazed with drugs, but they glowed painfully like superheated, molten silver.

Okay, back to real time. The doors opened, I took in the three people in front of me, and…

Rachel’s gaze flickered when she heard the doors open, suddenly widened into something near awareness. It flitted around the room fast and quickly met mine. She sniffed. Recognition flared. Her body tensed, then froze as if that impulse would get her whacked. When her eyes flitted to the woman, her scent grew rank with fear, and she looked back at me in terror. She conveyed all of that without a move, despite what the guard had pumped into her.

It was me who moved, right at the blond woman, a split second before her mental talons reached out to shred my thoughts. It didn’t matter. My momentum had already built, and by the time agony blinded me I’d popped my claws and swung. The psychic blast didn’t affect Rachel, and despite her tight bonds, she smashed the heel of her hand into the guard’s nose and pounded her clasped fists into his solar plexus. The combination broke his nose and dropped him to his knees, but he still was able to trigger the thumb control. Rachel shrieked, clawed at the collar, and crashed to the floor as electrical shocks destroyed her motor control. The pain in my head disappeared when Blondie fell in pieces, so I let my momentum carry me past the first corpse to the man who quickly became the second.

I dropped to Rachel’s side and used my claws to dispense with the collar and chains. When I got her into my arms, her dog tags fell face up so I could read the inscription.

OMEN. 169-23-529.

The same number appeared faintly on her inner arm like a faded tattoo.

My rage erupted. Marking my woman like a slave, like they’d marked me decades ago – they hadn’t had to tattoo it on her arm because they’d drugged it into her brain –

She started to rouse, so I banked my anger. Her eyes hazed in and out of focus, aftereffect of the shocks, and stared as if she didn’t believe I was real. The glow in her eyes paled enough to reveal how dilated her pupils were.

“Rachel –”

She touched my lips tentatively, silencing me, and touched my arms as if she were trying to determine if I were real. She stared, blinking almost as if she were drunk. She took a deep breath, testing my scent. Her hand touched my cheek as if she expected an electric shock.

“Wolvie,” she whispered.

Another explanation for what happened in a heartbeat – Rachel called me Wolverine only when we were working, and she’d never called me Wolvie. That was Jube’s choice of monikers, but Rachel had always called me Logan. I thought about what Daniel had warned me about – that this place would track everything from heartbeat to respiration to facial expression. Then I breathed in deeply, filling my lungs with Rachel’s scent. Foremost, I smelled the reek of drugs. Under that, I smelled her distinctive scent and her emotions – adrenaline, confusion, fading fear. Under that, I smelled Rachel’s feelings for me. In this place of pain where nothing was what it seemed, her regard for me was my base, the one I trusted. So just as Rachel had warned me about the telepath with only her scent and her eyes, now she couched both a warning and her affection in a single word.

I let my body tell her the only thing that mattered. I smelled the jolt of adrenaline behind her smile, but it lasted only a second before she fainted. I held her in my arms. We were in a rotten spot, but that didn’t matter. She was alive, she knew who I was, and we were one.

 

* * *

I glanced at the clock. Pointless gesture, really. The data stream told me the time anytime I cared to ask it. I just… anticipated the moment when I’d cut the power going tae Rachel’s prison. You cannae understand the knife’s edge, just waiting, waiting, waiting for the right moment, the right nanosecond. Maybe a surgeon feels that edge as the scalpel is poised over the patient, about tae start the race between the clock and the body, the healthy tissue and the cancer, that point where the scales tip out of balance and the result is as much due to skill as the fall of the dice. Maybe runners feel that edge the second before the gun goes off. I called it the one-zero moment, the on-off moment, the geek moment. Things were going one way, and I was about tae send them in another.

The moment came, fifty minutes after Logan had set out from the jet. I sent the electrons dancing in their new way, and relaxed as they flowed.

Alarms screamed across the data stream. Lights flashed on my computers. Six events were triggered by my little song, all of them focused on tracking me down.

I closed my eyes and gave myself tae the blur with a smile. The war was on.

 

* * *

 

Rachel roused from her faint. Slowly, slowly, she focused on me. Her eyes widened and her face froze, then she bolted out of my arms and fled to the other side of the room. She took in the dead guard, the pieces of the blond women, and her eyes blazed so brightly that it was hard to look at them. The smell of her anger was so intense that it slapped me in the face – no, more than that. The air itself seemed to flex –

“Another escape sim?” she graveled, looking at the vid port. “Logan still isn’t here, Cameron. You can’t pull that chain anymore.”

She’d forgotten me. Something had stripped all memory of me. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe that collar had fried her so often that she didn’t have brain function anymore. I swallowed my dismay and approached her slowly with open hands.

“Shh, shh, darlin’. Rest easy.”

“You’re not real. This game doesn’t work anymore, Cameron.”

Her voice had been loud enough, but flat, toneless, as dead as her eyes behind the glow. She backed into a corner. Only when I followed and tried to take her arm did she react, and it was to smash the heel of her hand into my nose. I saw it coming fast enough that she didn’t quite pound my nose into my brain, but she made a bloody mess that took a few seconds to heal. I had my hands full in that few seconds as she ruthlessly set on me, aiming for soft tissue and pressure points where my adamantium offered no protection. No question what they’d drilled into her – the most brutal assassin’s moves there were. She made enough of those few seconds that I was hard pressed to stop her, even given my weight advantage and the drugs in her system, but I didn’t retaliate other than to block her moves.

“You don’t have to play anythin’, darlin’,” I coaxed her in Japanese, at last snaring both her arms and pulling her into my body. “I’m real, Rachel-san. You know what I smell like. I’m real.”

She stilled, sniffed. Recognition dawned. She looked at the bodies, breathed in deeply again.

“It’s me, Rachel-san. No sim. Just me.”

The light in her eyes dimmed to the bearable point and her heartbeat settled.

“Logan-san…”

“Yeah, darlin’.”

When the lights started to blink and the door opened, her eyes flared back to their painful brilliance. She tugged me urgently through the door and down the corridor, her free hand straying to her neck as if remembering the price of delay. I looked behind us once. The slight moisture remnants of Rachel’s bare footprints, already fading in the dimness, left only the faintest smudge against the steel. The trail of my boots was clearer. The only other visible trails were probably from Rachel and the guard when they’d gone into the room we’d just left. Either the cleaning service was unbelievably efficient, or few people came down this hallway. The hall itself didn’t seem to have doorways other than the one that closed behind us. There were no knobs or hinges, just seams between panels, one of which slid aside to reveal a room. Rachel hustled us into the room and the panel slid closed behind us.

The room was the dimly lit black matte of a simulation chamber, featureless unless you counted the drain in the middle of the floor – something I’m sure only the cleanup crew appreciated. Rachel pointed at the recessed audio port near the top of one wall, and the protruding camera pickup in the middle of the ceiling. I subvocalized as I eyed them both. I couldn’t reach the vid pickup, but I popped a claw and leaped high enough to ram a claw into the audio port. Rachel flinched, wrapping arms around herself as if she expected an electric shock or some other retaliation, but as the seconds passed, nothing happened. Her hands went to her neck, and she looked at her wrists like she didn’t know where the cuffs had gone. Her eyes filled with misery as she tried to cover her scarred arms. I wrapped my arms around her and sat us down on the floor in the corner. She shivered and her hands were icy as she crowded against me. Her arms snaked around my ribs. Slowly, slowly, as her body started to relax, I kept my senses about me for the next trial.

Rachel wormed her hand carefully, slowly around my ribs to the middle of my back. A single finger pressed against the leather of my uniform, then backed off. It did it again. And again. All at once I recognized the presses as ancient Morse code. I did my best not to let my heart rate change or my body flinch. I slid one hand between our bodies and pressed a finger against her sternum, acknowledging. Then I shut my eyes, let my breath deepen, and waited for Rachel to spell out her words against my back.

_Got you, too? Don’t talk. They listen._

_Track vitals too. Not empathy, scent. Status?_

Her eyes were almost black they were so dilated, and her muscle tone was iffy. _Drugs. Electrical shocks. Exhausted._

_What drug?_

_Don’t know. Can’t remember one minute to the next._

_How long does it last?_

_Shoot me up every couple hours._

_What do they want?_

_Want me to kill. Want you to make me. They think we’re connected. You took telepath down fast, proves their point._

_You were scared for me. In your scent, eyes. Any other telepaths?_

_Only Feeder. Dead woman. Sim coming._

I remembered my earliest Weapon X training. I called it the maze. You can call it a nasty refinement of the obstacle course. The point wasn’t to get from the start to the finish, but through all the scenarios in one piece. They hadn’t had simulation projectors when I’d gone through the adamantium process, so they’d put me through the real thing – one scenario after another, seeing how I reacted, training me, trying to get into my head and control their perfect killing machine. At lot of what I’d endured featured Canada’s worst winter weather. Once I’d gotten loose and disappeared for months, running with a pack of wolves. There wasn’t much difference between the animals and me, though I had fewer legs and longer claws. Rachel didn’t have my physical endurance, so I expected that the simulations she’d been put through featured more clement surroundings, if the intent was no different. I hoped Daemon and his electrons would enter the game before I found out.

_Daemon says otherwise. He’s pissed._

Rachel frowned. _Who?_

I paused. _You don’t remember?_

Rachel tensed nervously. _Don’t remember much._

I rubbed her back. _OK. Tell me about here._

She tensed again. _Try to make me assassin. Lots of sims. I know difference between avatar and human target. Won’t kill unless attacked even with drugs, collar, beatings. I did something terrible, don’t remember, no more beatings, more drugs, no sleep. They want you to get me to kill on command._

I thought about that. Rachel’s talents were undeveloped when I’d first met her. With training, she’d gotten comfortable with them and learned to trust them. But under stress, they’d greatly expanded. The standard practice to break an unwilling operative was to strip away her humanity in whatever way did it best, then build back what you wanted. Rape was a common method to use on women, but I didn’t smell that on her. Had her handlers figured out that physical duress drove her talents to expand? Sims would push her talents, too, but maybe the drugs counteracted that.

And why did Rachel’s handlers think that I’d willingly get her to kill offensively, on command?

A scrap of memory came loose, of me doing exactly that at someone’s command, in a Weapon X facility long forgotten….

I kept coming back to the collar, the chains, the drugs… all those restraints in the belly of a high-security, secret military facility for a barely 155-centimeter tall, civilian woman with no healing factor, no military training, no offensive mutant talents…

What was the terrible thing Rachel did that they were scared of? Should I be scared, too?

Maybe they’d just fucked with her head so much that she didn’t know what they had or hadn’t done.

_I’ll get you out, darlin’. My promise._

She flinched, probably not remembering me again. But she remembered enough to test my scent again, and then relaxed. Her hand snaked against my sternum, staying close to me to screen our communication from the vid ports. _Drugs make me forget… I need to remember things._

I thought fast so I didn’t delay in replying to Rachel, if only to keep her fractured attention on me. The longer it took Daemon to cut the power to this place, the longer we had for the drug to weaken its hold on Rachel, and the better chance I had of her being able to help me. More than an hour had surely passed since I banged on the door, though, and as pissed as Daemon was, he wasn’t going to drag his feet –

The dim lights went out, but it wasn’t Daemon’s doing. The black matte flushed with color, sound, and scent, and while the smells weren’t accurate to my nose, most humans would’ve thought them convincing. A slum alley that looked like the worst part of Tokyo glowed into life around us. It was dark and raining hard. Rachel’s grey tee shirt and sweat pants morphed into sleek black leather.

From around a pile of garbage came a soldier in the nondescript camouflage dress I’d come to associate with Weapon X. He was the real thing, not an avatar. He loomed over us to toss a paper into Rachel’s lap.

“Pair of targets, one for each of you,” he snarled. “Make sure you each get the right one, or you won’t like the consequences.”

Rachel stayed in my arms, without any apparent evidence that she’d heard the soldier. Then her body tensed and her fingers tapped my knuckles. When the soldier pulled his foot back to kick her, we were ready for him, and he ended up skewering his foot on my claws like so much shish kabob.

“Makin’ threats has consequences, too, bub,” I growled as the soldier screamed. “Guess your superiors haven’t figured that out yet, eh?”

The soldier flinched himself off my claws and limped off to wherever he came from. Rachel climbed out of my lap with the paper in her hand. There wasn’t much light in the dim alley, but she didn’t have any problems reading what was on the paper. Before she forgot I was here, I put a hand on her arm and read over her shoulder. It was a standard description of a dual assassination target and where the hits were supposed to take place. I turned her towards me, put my hand on her sternum.

 _I’m still here_ , I signed.

She took a breath to remind herself. The paper slipped through her fingers to turn into pulp on the wet cement by our feet.

 _Sim. Not real,_ she signed.

_Go along. You lead. I’ll cover._

She took the knife that appeared on the top of a trashcan, turned without preamble, and headed up the alley. I lay back, watching our backs, while Rachel scanned ahead, her eyes glowing. The rain was messy and uncomfortable, but good cover. She moved confidently but mechanically, as if her heart weren’t in it.

I won’t bore you with the details. We had the usual unexpected people jumping out at us, none of which caused either of us to break a sweat. We had a few unexpected twists, such as my target and Rachel’s apparently changing places, and a random human that looked like Rachel’s target. She recognized the switch immediately and had the sap down in two nonlethal blows, but nothing they threw at her created any delays or confusion. Rachel avoided the pursuit, the attacks, and the false clues and ran the sim targets through the rats’ warren of alleys like a professional. In the end, she did the deed without a gram of emotion. She was drugged to the gills, she was exhausted, and she had only bits of her personality, but despite my fury at what Weapon X had done, I had to admit…

Have you ever watched a cobra take down a mouse? It moves so fast, so subtly that all you see is a puff of dust. Sometimes you think the mouse gets away because it keeps running for several meters, not knowing how badly it’s hurt until the neurotoxin starts to work. There’s no wasted effort, no fanfare. The actual death is a denouement.

Rachel killed like that.

Sure, this was a sim. But to watch her was to appreciate and admire the elegance and subtlety of an expert. Her timing was perfect, even giving us time to retreat before anyone else noticed the deaths. By the time the expected chaos resulted from the kills, she’d already gotten us out of range. During the retreat, she watched my back and worked with me as an extension of my own body to fend off the two attempted retaliations. Despite what they’d done to her, part of me reveled in her mastery of the hunt. It hurt, sawing between my appreciation of a kindred spirit and my hatred for the people who’d so debased my woman –

Rachel’s glowing eyes turned on me as she sensed my emotional turmoil –

The sim winked out all at once. As pitch black fell, the subliminal hum of equipment behind the walls died, too. Deamon. He was late, but in the game. I waited to see if emergency lights kicked in, but things stayed dark, so it looked like the X-Men had killed the backup power system, too.

Rachel’s scent flushed with confusion. Through repetition she’d learned how to navigate the surreal world of assassination sims, but out of that narrow purview, she didn’t have the first idea of what to do. I didn’t know whether that was because of drugs, brain damage, or exhaustion, but I snagged Rachel’s arm and put my mouth next to her ear.

“Our turn now. Come on.”

I drew her with me as I groped my way to the part of the wall that had once been a door.

“Gonna get the door open,” I whispered in Japanese. We generally stuck to that language when we were together, and the way we spoke it wasn’t easy for eavesdroppers to understand. It offered security as well as familiarity, which might help Rachel keep her focus.

“ _Hai_ ,” she replied in kind, and took hold of the back of my belt.

I popped one set of claws, and methodically began to punch holes in the wall. It was only steel, not adamantium, and after four or five blows I was able to wrestle the panel to the right a few inches. Another two, and I moved it a few more inches, enough that I could wedge my shoulder in the opening and bring all of my strength to bear.

“Come on.”

Rachel edged behind me, one hand still on my belt, the other on the wall as we ventured into the hallway. I thought about retracing our steps back the way we’d come, but something about that felt wrong. I turned right, deeper into the maze, and groped forward.

“Does your jammer still work?” I whispered.

Rachel’s faint reply came out of the pitch like that of a disembodied spirit. “Do I have one?”

“GPS monitor, too. Either of them still work?”

She swallowed nervously. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“S’okay, darlin’. Just keep tellin’ yourself that we’re gettin’ out. Do you remember anything about where this hallway leads?”

It was painful how hard Rachel tried to focus – she started to sweat and her breathing sped up. “The sim always starts in a different room. I think I’ve figured out the orientation. The people come from that way.” She tugged on my belt to indicate the right side of the hall.

I remembered how long the corridor had seemed when we’d come down it, and about where I expected it to end. When we walked down that far, I found a bulkhead and a door that stuck out slightly from the rest of the wall. After a few more punches, I pried it open and eased us through. Behind the door was another corridor, this one lit with battery-charged emergency lights. They were dim, but enough for me to see. Footprints were a lot more prevalent here, and some of the panels were slightly raised on the sides of the halls. Maybe we were out of the maze and into the handlers’ section.

“Still with me, Rachel-san?” I said.

“We were doing the sim. The lights went out, and we’re here now,” she ventured, looking lost. “You’re real. This isn’t a sim.”

“This is real,” I assured her.

She shivered. “Sometimes the sims go this way. Like I’m going to get out...”

I put my hands on her arms, hoping to feed her sense of me. “The sims can’t feed you emotions, darlin’. They can’t feed you smells. You know my emotions, my scent. That’s how you know this is real. You understand?”

Her face cleared a fraction as her eyes searched mine. “Emotions and scent. I remember. I’ll keep trying to remember.”

“Good. Let’s keep movin’.”

We skulked along the corridor, quickly came to a flight of stairs that led to upper and lower floors. Rachel’s hand tugged on my belt.

“I… think someone’s coming. Above us.”

I listened hard, sniffed. Nothing. “Time frame?”

The sweat in her scent went up as she concentrated. “Less than a minute. Three… people? Men?”

I scanned the dim hall, and backed up to be out of sight to anyone descending until the last minute. “I smell ‘em,” I muttered, and got her fingers free from my belt. “Sit tight.”

Sure enough, in thirty seconds a trio of soldiers came stealthily down the stairs. I let my claws slide out without a sound. I was through the first one before the second one’s feet were set, and through that one by the time the third one piled in. Not much of a contest.

“Good job.” I beckoned to Rachel as I bent over the bodies. I passed her a set of night vision goggles. “Might need these.”

Rachel took the glasses numbly. When I glanced up, her eyes were stricken. “The smell of blood. The sims don’t get it right. And I smell adrenaline.”

My jaw tightened. This was what Weapon X had wanted, me teaching her that my best defense was a good offense. I hadn’t waited for the soldiers to corner me, but had fallen on them before they knew they were hunted. Did they think that if someone Rachel trusted killed like that, then she would, too? That pissed me off – but I put a lid on my anger to keep Rachel from reacting to it.

“Good part is that you know it. The drugs are fadin’, Rachel-san.”

“Not fast enough. There are things I need to tell you, but I can’t remember. I need to.”

I passed her a trank pistol. At least these guys hadn’t trooped down here with projectile weapons, which would have cut a swath given all the metal surfaces. “Keep tryin’, darlin’. Take this. You ain’t steady on your feet yet. Keep the bastards at a distance until your head clears.”

“Something about knives, Logan. I have to tell you something about knives.”

“Knives, as booby traps? Somethin’ they did to you? Somethin’ you need to find?”

She stood for a long second, too long, but I kept quiet, hoping she’d remember something. “Not traps. Not to find. Knives. I felt knives.”

“A tag? Did they put in a tag?”

She touched the dog tags, looked questioningly at me.

“Not those. An internal tracking beacon.”

She thought hard again, tsked at herself in frustration, looked at her scarred arms. “I don’t remember, Logan. I don’t remember.”

“You trust me, Rachel-san?”

“I trust you.”

“I’m gonna check. You remember how I did that once before. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

She nodded, so I put a hand under the back of her tee shirt to touch her skin lightly. I felt weals, probably from the beatings she mentioned. Just behind her right hipbone, I felt the small bump I’d been looking for.

“Do you remember this?” I pressed a finger gently against the bump. She groped for my hand and felt it for herself.

“No.”

“It’s hard and cylindrical like a tag, darlin’, just under the skin. Not even much of a scar.”

“That’s part of what I have to tell you. Can you get it out without… so I can still walk afterwards?”

“Sure. It’s small. It’ll hurt, but I’ll be quick.”

She didn’t blink. I didn’t like that – it meant she was used to getting hurt. One more thing I had to settle with Weapon X. “Do it.”

“C’mere, closer to the light.”

I guided her away from the bodies, under one of the flickering emergency lights, and got her arranged so I had a clear shot of the bump. I let one claw slide out silently, out of her vision, and pretended to probe the bump, in reality pressing the skin taut over it.

“Hey, kid, what’s seventeen times forty-two?”

As soon as she concentrated on my unexpected question, I slit the thinned skin along the scar and popped the cylinder out with a squeeze. It was a tag, sure enough, but the incision I made was just a centimeter long and shallow. She flinched automatically, but that was it – no grimace, no gasp, nothing. She shouldn’t be so inured to being cut.

“Done,” I said gruffly. “Sit there, let the pain ease.”

“I can’t,” she whispered. Her voice went up in frustration. “Someone else is coming. Five minutes. Another group of three. I can’t concentrate, Logan – damn the drugs!”

“The drugs are clearin’,” I observed. “You gave a five-minute warnin’ this time, not thirty seconds, and you sound positive about the number. Maybe the pain gave you back some of your focus.”

She thought about that. “I’m sure about the five minutes and the three people. And I know the tag wasn’t all I need to tell you about. But I can’t get what else I need to remember.”

“A little at a time, Rachel. It’s comin’ back. C’mon. We’ll ditch the tag with the bodies and put some distance between us and them.”

“Something about pain,” she murmured more to herself than me as she got to her feet. “They stopped beating me because of the pain… what the pain did to me… what the pain made me do?”

Neither of us had a chance to push on that, because the people Rachel had sensed got nearer. I grabbed her hand and we ran down the stairs as quietly as we were able. Two floors above us, footsteps echoed. I pushed through the first door that opened and found myself in another featureless corridor. Rachel and I flitted down it to the far end, where we found another stairwell. It echoed with footsteps, too, so we were stuck between the two groups.

Rachel backtracked a few steps, pounded her fists on the wall panels. When she didn’t find anything right away, I stationed myself at the door.

“Which group will get here first?” I asked.

“That one,” she said, pointing at the door beside me. “There are six in that group. If I can find a door…”

At her next smack on the steel, one of the panels jutted out. She wrestled to push it aside. I ran to help her, and we ducked inside what looked to be a lab. No people. I pulled the door shut. When I turned back to Rachel, she’d taken tentative steps into the middle of the equipment.

“I remember this,” she whispered doubtfully. “At least…. I think I do….”

“Think while we hide,” I growled, pulling her past a gurney and a medical computer, then a rack full of computer monitors and documentation. “They can get in here just as easy –”

The entrance panel slid open behind us. I pulled Rachel behind an equipment rack and pressed a finger to my lips. She clenched the trank pistol in one hand and the night vision goggles in the other and nodded. Her eyes were still hazy, if less than before, but I wouldn’t count on her for much yet. So when the six soldiers filed in and headed straight for us, I didn’t delay. I dodged around a second rack and caught the rear guard just as the front man shouted a warning. It didn’t matter – I was through him before the rest got set, and Rachel took out another with her trank pistol. Two of the soldiers grabbed her arms and ended up rolling around on the floor with her, which left me with the last two. I took a trio of trank darts, but they only made me mad as I swatted both soldiers into pulp. I went after the two wrestling Rachel next, but she’d already smacked one of them unconscious and was doing the same to the last one. She slammed the night vision glasses against his ear until they shattered, stunning him. When he fell, she was on his chest before I could move in. I aimed my claws at the joints between his body armor.

“No! Not yet!” Rachel yelled. “I remember this one!”

I sheathed my claws. While his thoughts wandered around looking for the rest of him, I grabbed his collar to keep him flat on the floor.

“Wake up, asshole,” I snarled in his ear. “Remember her? Do ya?”

It was a tossup whether the soldier’s eyes would focus before Rachel could gather her thoughts. Turned out to be a dead heat. When Rachel’s eyes cleared, his brain engaged all in a rush and his body spasmed under her.

“You’re loose!” he blurted.

Rachel’s eyes narrowed into a feral glare. “I’ve got friends, too. Tell me why you’re scared enough to pump me full of drugs.”

“Go to hell,” the solider spat.

I didn’t expect Rachel to slap him as hard as she did. Her face twisted with an anger that smelled like one of my better peeves and she dug her fingers into his throat. The air quivered trying to contain the emotion. “This is hell. You tell me why that is, or I’ll find things to do with your liver that’ll make you wish I’d stopped at your larynx. What did you do to me?”

“I don’t know!”

“Yes, you do!” Rachel jerked him out of my hand and shook him so hard that his head banged against the metal floor with a resounding clang. “I remember you – you were one of the guys who lit into me with rubber hoses when I first got here. Your buddies tried to rape me. You were the only one who lived through that. Do you want to see how fast a trank gun up your ass would get you to tell me what I want to know?”

She seized his shirt, tearing away the buttons, hooking fingers in the thin mesh of his tee shirt, and ripping a huge hole in it to expose his chest. She ripped his belt buckle open and his pants zipper down, then she jammed the trank pistol into his groin hard enough to make him cry out, if not half as hard as he deserved.

“Why all the drugs?” she snarled.

The guy was scared enough to try to fight, so I yanked him back flat on the floor, popped one set of claws, and held them up where he could see them. “Answer her.”

“I don’t know anything about the drugs!”

“You know what they do to me,” Rachel snarled, grinding the trank gun into his crotch hard enough that he yelled in as much pain as fear. “You know what I did to make them give me the drugs. Tell me!”

“They’re better than the beatings, aren’t they, mutie scum? You ought to be grateful –”

He howled when Rachel smacked him across the face with the butt of the gun hard enough to splatter blood. She followed that up by pounding some very sensitive pressure points until he howled again. “No more than you are right now! Tell me what I want to know or I won’t use the butt of this thing!”

“They keep you docile! Easy to lead!”

“Why do I need to be docile?”

“No strong emotions!” he shrieked as Rachel pounded him again.

A door crashed open somewhere outside the lab, and feet started to pound down the hall.

“Gotta go.” I yanked Rachel out of the soldier’s reach. She resisted only long enough to fire the trank pistol point blank at him, then followed me to the back of the lab to another door. We passed into yet another hallway and fled as fast as we could run.

“No pain, no strong emotions,” Rachel muttered behind me. She cursed in Japanese, still revealing more frustration than anger, but the anger was coming on. “Logan, I can’t think –”

“Not now,” I panted, hearing more footsteps pounding towards us. “First – how many comin’ at us?”

Rachel pulled me to a stop and her eyes blazed again as her talents looked at what was in front of us. Then she looked behind. “Six behind. Two in front – Kurt and Scott.”

“About time.” I grabbed her arm and pulled her forward. About twenty meters down the corridor Scott and Kurt bampfed into sight, just in front of the doors.

“Nightcrawler! Get her outa here!” I shoved Rachel towards our friend. “Cyclops! Six incoming!”

Kurt ran to Rachel as Scott joined me to face the approaching soldiers. But Rachel dodged away from Kurt.

“No – there’s something I can’t remember – I can’t remember something important –”

“Get her outa here, Elf!” I bellowed.

Kurt’s face twisted in confusion, holding his hands out to Rachel. “Liebchen, let me –”

“I can’t!” Rachel shouted. I twisted around, set to force her into Kurt’s arms, but she was tearing at her baggy tee shirt. “The knives – there’s still something about knives – Kurt, Logan, it’s important –”

“They ain’t far,” I told Scott, nodding to the door.

“I got it,” he said, and turned towards it, his hand on his visor ready for whatever came at us. I ran to Rachel, and realized Kurt was trying help Rachel pull up the back of her tee shirt, looking for –

“Zhere are a lot of scars, Wolverine.” Kurt turned her towards me, his dark face set in anger. He was right, but most of them were the weals I’d felt earlier. Higher up, though, just beneath her left shoulder blade was another surgical scar.

“Shit!” I growled. Something was embedded underneath the scar. “Do you remember this one? It’s six centimeters long to the left of your spine.”

Rachel mouthed something to herself, casting for something, anything in her thoughts. She looked at Scott, at Kurt –

I shook her hard and subvocalized, not liking it, but if pain and strong emotion made her focus, then now was when she needed them. “Think, Rachel! What about the knives? Find it now!”

My snarl shocked her into stillness. When she met my eyes, it was with almost complete clarity.

“It’s an implant that explodes outside the building –”

I swore. “Elf! Get Jean down here!”

Kurt’s only reply was a swirl of black, a stench of brimstone, and a bampf that made my ears pop.

“Get ready,” Rachel said. “They’re coming.”

We ran back to the lab. I shoved Rachel behind the banks of equipment and stood beside Scott.

The next five minutes were brutal. Scott and I accounted for nine of the bastards. Rachel put her trank pistol and hand-to-hand expertise to use for another three. Kurt, Rogue, and Jean bampfed into the middle of things just as the soldiers sent in reinforcements and it took hectic seconds to get everyone on our side out of the way. The last soldier was still groaning when I hustled Jean over to Rachel and explained what we were dealing with – an implanted explosive device. I didn’t get any farther than the explanation when Rachel clenched my hand.

“There are two groups of six coming in.”

“On it!” Scott waved a hand and stood ready, his hand at his visor.

When the soldiers crashed in, Scott’s reactions were perfect, meeting them with optical blasts, and Kurt bampfed in and out to add his efforts to the fray. Rogue relied on good old-fashioned punches and a touch or two when things got tight. Unexpectedly, an explosion behind Jean and Rachel sent shock waves over us, and more soldiers crashed in through a back entrance. Smoke and flames made it hard to see, and everyone was shouting and thrashing. A soldier ran over Rachel straight at Jean, swinging a pistol. It caught Jean on the temple, taking her down like a sack of meal. A grenade flew loose, and even my reactions were hard pressed to fall over Rachel and Jean before it went off and sent fragments of equipment and flesh in all directions. I caught most of the metal between the women and the explosion, but Rachel screamed again as shards peppered her legs. A piece of computer sheathing sliced my side, taking flesh with it…

When my vision cleared, I was under a dozen soldiers, my arms cuffed behind me. The cuffs weren’t adamantium, but the bodies pinning me made them impossible to remove. Scott was tied up with another six. Jean was down and looked dead, but her heartbeat told me she was only unconscious. And while Kurt and Rogue were still free, they were backed up against the wall facing enough weapon muzzles that Kurt should’ve used his talents to take them elsewhere. Rachel was pinned against a wall by three soldiers.

For a split second, it was silent except for panting. Then someone strode into the lab towards us. I couldn’t see him, but the sound of the boots told me he was military. I got my head up in time to see a slight guy not much taller than me with the stripes of a major on his shoulders and a small medical kit in his hands. He had that bureaucratic look about him that cared more about data than humans, because his expression was impatience and exasperation, not anger. He pulled out a hypodermic needle.

“Hold out her arm,” he ordered one of the soldiers pinning Rachel.

Rachel looked up. Her eyes flared to that molten intensity as the soldier yanked her arm out for the major. “You’re Cameron,”

“And you’re the puppet,” he said shortly, flicking her dog tags with a finger before turning the crook of her arm up for the needle.

She jerked her arm away from him. “Hardly. I don’t do what you want, do I?”

The guy put a hand around Rachel’s throat without any emotion, almost casually, squeezing until Rachel couldn’t breathe.

“I’ve been way too lenient with you. I’ve got another set of drugs for you and your new instructor Wolverine. Not to mention a brand new telepath named Shredder who’ll rip through what little the drugs leave of you. She’ll do wonders on your friends, too.”

He let her go to concentrate on the needle over her arm, but Rachel jerked it away again.

“You know what happens when you threaten me, Cameron. More to the point, I know, too.”

I’d never heard so much death in Rachel’s quiet voice. But Cameron seemed unimpressed. “You won’t after a dose of this. In fact, I doubt if you’ll remember your name or anything else outside of this place. Maybe that’s what you’ve wanted all along, not having to savor what I’ve made of you.”

He nodded to another pair of soldiers who joined the first one pinning Rachel’s arm. They forced it flat against the wall, the crook of her elbow ready for Cameron’s hypodermic. The needle came up, and the soldiers wound their grips tighter on me and Scott, got set to advance on Kurt and Rogue.

Rachel’s eyes flared into that unbearable brightness again. “What I wanted was for you to have the balls to come out and try to do some of the dirty work yourself.”

Rachel’s looked past the soldier to Kurt and Rogue. “Run,” she said, as her anger flared, overwhelming the scent of two dozen sweating soldiers.

The Elf bampfed out with Rogue. In the stir that that caused, the soldiers milled around, giving Kurt the chance he needed to bampf back in, grab Jean, and bampf out, creating even more confusion. One soldier pulled a gun that wasn’t loaded with darts and put it to Scott’s temple. When Rachel met my eyes, I didn’t see the deer-in-the-headlights look I expected – her fatalism scared me as much as her quiet voice had.

Cameron jabbed the needle into the scarred crook of Rachel’s elbow.

When Rachel spasmed, her anger boiled over as hot as the molten silver light in her eyes, paralyzing everyone around her. The air crackled with that anger, just as it had earlier, but it didn’t stop there. My own temper rose. More importantly, I felt the soldiers around me filling with their rage –

It wasn’t their rage. It was Rachel’s. She was projecting fury into everyone around her –

As fast as the strike of a cobra, the emotion changed from anger to fear. It roiled into such paralyzing terror that I tasted it. It crawled over my skin, slithered into my thoughts, and scrambled them.

It was a good thing that I saw no images. The emotions were blinding enough. I don’t know what anyone else felt. But I felt Sabretooth rape and murder my wife Silver Fox, over and over again, each time at a higher emotional intensity, her terror battering me, becoming me, until I wanted to kill myself.

It took a long time for the screaming to stop. Some of it was mine.

When I came to myself, Cameron lay in a heap at Rachel’s feet in a pool of blood that had run from his nose, ears, and eyes. I wrenched my wrists free of the cuffs and got myself off the floor. Most of the soldiers had cut their own throats or shot themselves. The few remaining ones were sobbing, curled into balls, wallowing in their bodily wastes, begging to die. I put them out of their misery quickly enough. Scott was lucky to be on his hands and knees, retching his guts out. I’d kept control of my guts, but my eyes were wet and I couldn’t see the battlefield around me for the horror still echoing in my mind. The sick smell of fear was overwhelming. I had to force myself to breathe. It took every gram of will not to pop my claws and slit my own throat.

The glow of Rachel’s eyes faded to nothing. Her eyes were wet, and the air simmered with the depth of her grief. She pulled the needle, still containing its poison, out of her arm and dropped it, and fell to her hands and knees.

For a split second, I wanted to kill her for pouring acid into an old wound that had never healed. It would be easy, a single claw across the back of neck, painless and swift –

“Do it. Just do it.”

Her eyes held so much terminal misery that I would’ve done her a bigger favor than I’d granted the soldiers. I swallowed. I shook my head. I pointed to Scott. “Take care of him.”

Rachel crawled to Scott’s side. She put a tentative hand on his shoulder. He’d long since hurled out everything that had seen the inside of his stomach during the past week, but his body still spasmed. In a moment his body quieted, and he was able to sit down and take some deep breaths. Then Rachel dragged herself up and put her hand on my arm. I didn’t fight her, but it took every bit of discipline not to shy away. At her touch, the terror faded, my heart slowed, and I wanted to breathe again. I pocketed the hypodermic that Cameron had rammed into Rachel’s arm, then got Scott on his feet and put a shoulder under his arm. Rachel offered her support on the other side as we crept slowly through the carnage.

The place was eerily silent as we moved slowly through the steel halls. But the silence didn’t last long. The power sprang back to life about two minutes after we’d cleared the combat zone. I cursed and tried to prop Scott against the wall so I’d be ready for whatever came at us.

“It’s Daemon,” the speakers said softly. “Sorry for the scare, X-Men. I’ve restored limited power tae the area where I last heard anyone speak. I’m nae getting any response from anyone. Can anyone respond?”

“Wolverine here, Daemon,” I croaked. “I’ve got Omen and Cyclops with me. All the soldiers I can see are down. Repeat, the soldiers are down. Don’t know where the rest of the X-Men are.”

“What happened? There was a surge of troop communications, then what sounded like a lot of screaming. Then nothing. I cannae raise any of the other X-Men. Are you all right?”

“We’re good enough to get out, Daemon,” I said gruffly. “Can you clear the doors between us and outside?”

“Done,” Daemon replied promptly. “I’ll leave the communications link open if you need tae give me more directions. Don’t dawdle, Wolverine. I’ve got the whole place set tae blow as soon as you and yours get clear. Just say the word.”

“That’ll be my pleasure,” I growled.

By the time we made our way out of the maze of hallways and stairs, we’d passed several dead soldiers, and one or two in various stages of severe emotional damage. None of them was in shape to note our passing. Scott was back on his feet, if still too stunned to talk, but he flinched when he realized Rachel helped me to prop him up. If she picked up on his emotional state, she didn’t say anything. Neither did I – part of me wanted to kick Scott, but the bigger part still struggled to hold what had happened.

At the main entrance, I slowed. The big steel door was half open. Through it, I spotted the X-Men’s Blackbird. A few of the X-Men seemed to mill around the plane, but their movements seemed random, disjointed. Then I understood that they, too, were suffering from Rachel’s projections. What kind of range did she have? I pushed Scott towards the jet.

“Go get Jean. Rachel can help her, then Jean can help us with the rest.”

Scott nodded dumbly and moved out of the facility.

I took Rachel’s arm even though she hadn’t moved after Scott. “Don’t think about it,” I growled in Japanese. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten what’s inside of you. I’m not gonna let you trigger it.”

Rachel remained still. “Nobody put the beast inside but me, Logan. It’s gotten strong.”

“You tease a dog and it gets mean, it ain’t the dog’s fault. If you think I’m gonna off myself because a bunch of assholes torqued my beast, think again. I’m not gonna let you do it, either.”

“I won’t have to,” she murmured, nodding at the X-Men. “When they figure out what happened and who did it, they’ll do it for you. Just like Weapon X planned to do in case they couldn’t figure out how to control what’s inside of me.”

I should’ve remembered that Rachel had spent two months fighting the worst black ops organization with nothing more than internal fortitude. But I didn’t, and I let her fatalistic words make me mad. My fury joined with the pain of Fox’s horrific death and lashed out at the one who’d birthed it.

“You think you’re the only one who has to deal with bad shit, with people using you?” I snarled, shaking her. I pulled out my own dog tags and shook them at her. “You’re not. Some of us have been just as fucked over. You talked a great line tellin’ me to resist it, so you gotta hold the line, too!”

When my emotions flooded Rachel, her face contorted in pain. Her eyes glowed. “Don’t you understand what I’ve become, Logan? I don’t have to cut off your head to kill you. All I have to do is to think about it!”

I felt the first tendrils of anger leech into my thoughts. I let my dog tags go, popped my claws, and put them in her face. “All I have to do is NOT think about it, and these can make just as big a mess of your head! So we’re on equal footin’!”

“I won’t kill your body, Logan. Only your mind. And you’ll either kill yourself or you’ll live in whatever insanity I give you for the rest of your life.”

“Do you think anythin’ you come up with is worse than what I’ve already lived through?”

“Did you know what Fox felt as she died before I showed you?” Rachel shouted, jerking out of my hold. The air crackled when her pain and fury roiled out of her control. “I can take that and magnify it until you die, just by thinking about it. Do you want that risk? Do you?”

The emotion in the air surged, twisted into fury, and slammed into my head, staggering me – then Rachel gasped and her hands went to her mouth. Her heart shuddered and skipped before it thumped back into rhythm. Her face blanched with shock and the air fell into terminal despair.

“Oh, God, Logan… I’ve turned into what they wanted. I’ve turned into just what they wanted. You ought to put me down. You ought to.”

Her body shook when I pulled her against me and put my mouth to her ear. “Maybe someone shoulda put me down a long time ago, too. But right now, we got people dependin’ on us. We’ll talk about who’s gonna off whom on our own time, after we take care of the troops.”

Scott brought Jean in his arms. She was either unconscious or catatonic, but she was alive. Under his visor, Scott’s face was thunderously angry, and given how badly Rachel flinched, his emotions were no less intense. The air flexed as she took Jean’s hand and forced herself to focus, to calm, to counter whatever Jean felt. In a few moments, Jean roused with a jerk and an inarticulate cry. Rachel recoiled as if Jean’s telekinesis had shoved her away before she was done, and Scott snatched Jean out of Rachel’s reach. By that time, I’d brought Kurt and ‘Ro and Rogue, and Rachel struggled to do what she could. I was glad she didn’t need skin contact to do whatever she did, so that both she and Rogue survived. Things still weren’t easy. Life seemed to drain out of Rachel as she fought to dissipate the terror, but ‘Ro was so shaken that she had a hard time speaking, and Kurt retreated to the other side of the jet, too distraught to be around the rest of us. Rogue was in the best shape by far, despite the shock in her eyes.

But Jean still spasmed in Scott’s arms and he wouldn’t let Rachel touch her again. If Rachel hadn’t looked so shattered, I would’ve forced the point. Maybe Jean’s psychic abilities had given her an extra dose of the virulence in Rachel’s projection, because objects kept twitching around her as she struggled to control her talents. She was in such bad shape that Scott was more of an asshole than usual and was all for hustling Jean aboard the jet and beating hell out of here.

It was not a good time to explain why Rachel couldn’t leave without surgical help.

There weren’t any volunteers. No one was in shape to give it, to be honest. Scott went on a tirade because Jean’s distress scared him shitless. Under the barrage, Rachel fled inside the building, out of strength, her own talents rippling back and forth out of her control. Everyone else let Scott rant without a word because they were too busy struggling with their own overload.

“Fellows, I’ve got incoming,” Daemon’s disembodied voice cut the tense silence. “A transport helicopter and following ground support. I give them ten minutes before the copter reaches you. You’ve got tae hie out of there fast.”

I turned on Scott, growling. “You don’t like what she did, that’s your business. She did it to save your life, bastard. So we ain’t gonna leave her here. And if you don’t get why outa humanitarian reasons, then think about what they’ll make outa her if you leave her here.”

“I thought you said she couldn’t leave because they embedded an explosive in her,” Scott snapped.

“I’ll take care of it,” I growled. “Try to be here when I get back. But if you can’t, leave my bike.”

I ran back into the facility. There were steps behind me, Rogue’s from the sound of them, but I didn’t look. Halfway down the first corridor, Rachel lay slumped against the wall like a shredded rag. As I pelted nearer, she shrank from the turmoil radiating from me. I should’ve controlled my fury at Scott, but it boiled out of me until I couldn’t speak. The air surged with Rachel’s pain and terror, but she somehow kept them from focusing on me. I tackled her, shoved her facedown on the floor, and planted myself on top of her hips. I tore her tee shirt up the back to her nape, exposing welts, bruises, and surgical scars. Growling at the ruin, I put one hand on the base of her neck and pressed down hard, immobilizing her. I popped two centimeters of a single claw –

Rogue grasped my raised hand.

“Let me help you, sugah,” she urged. “That thing might be wired to blow soon as you touch it.”

“What can you do about it?” I snarled.

She held up her hands. One held a medical kit. The other was bare of its usual glove. “Me? Not a thing, sugah. But Jean could, and before she went off the deep end, Ah borrowed a little of her mojo.”

Rogue hated touching people because when she drained their life force, she took a little of their personality inside her. Like me, she hated sharing her head with a telepath. But she’d done that now.

I gave her a bare smile. “What’s your plan, doc?”

She smiled back as thinly. “Ah don’t know if I can do the cuttin’ and the containment at the same time, bro. If you handle the knife, Ah’ll handle the thing.”

I looked down at Rachel and remembered when I’d been caged in a Weapons X lab, no less helpless, no less exhausted. I didn’t like that I was the one inflicting the pain this time.

“Hang on, Rachel-san,” I graveled. “It’s gonna hurt, but we’ll get that thing out. I won’t let anything else happen to you. My word on it.”

She forced her projections quiet with what remained of her strength. “Do what you need to. I’ll try to keep my emotions from targeting you.”

“Okay, darlin’. Rogue, here we go.”

Rogue gave Rachel a shot of local anesthetic like a pro. The adamantium on my claws is sharper than any surgical scalpel, and once Rachel’s shoulder was numb, I cut before she realized it. Rogue’s forehead furrowed as she concentrated to contain the detonation device as I slipped it out. It was an innocuous-looking thing, one half by one by three centimeters, and just under the skin. Rogue quickly took it from me with her borrowed telekinesis so I could slap on a temporary bandage. Then I hauled Rachel over my shoulder and ran for the exit with Rogue hard on my heels.

“Thirty seconds, Daemon!” I shouted as the exit loomed before us.

“Understood,” Daniel’s voice echoed, as we pounded out of the steel crypt and into the open air.

The jet was still there, but its engines were powering up. Kurt bampfed next to it with my bike. When he saw us, he hustled the hog into the jet and beckoned urgently for us to follow him. Rogue sent the explosive device hurtling back towards the facility and then cut her borrowed telekinesis. The detonation against the outer wall was impressive, but I didn’t have time to get mad at it. The sound echoed only a second or two before other explosions began underground as Daniel unleashed his angry beasties. Rogue shoved me into a run towards the gantry even as the engines reached their takeoff speed. In twenty seconds, we were in the clouds. The black clouds billowing up from the wrecked facility chased us only a second or two before the Black Bird’s speed outdistanced them.

Once we were airborne, I prepared to stitch Rachel’s incision. She was ashen and blood had already soaked through the temporary bandage and her ripped shirt, but before she let me tend her, she went to each of our friends, offering what additional help she could to ease them. With Jean sobbing silently in his arms, Scott rebuffed Rachel’s offer angrily. ‘Ro was easier after a brief touch, if quiet. But while Kurt’s yellow eyes were distraught, he shook his head.

“I vill be all right, Liebchen,” he said softly, and though he didn’t look like it now, I knew Kurt well enough to know that he told the truth. He took Rachel’s hand in his three-fingered ones and patted it gently. “Keep somezhing for yourself. And I am very, very glad that zhe man who hurt you and so many ozhers is no more.”

Rogue turned in her seat towards Rachel. She even managed an encouraging smile. “Same goes for me, sugah. Ah’m good with the one dose.”

I started on Rachel’s stitches. She quietly passed out before I’d knotted the second one, so I kept her on the emergency gurney in the back of the jet and worked as fast as the jet’s turbulence let me. In less than 20 minutes, we landed in the X-Men’s hangar under the Xavier Mansion.

I was the first one off the jet with Rachel in my arms. I wanted only to carry her up to my room and lock the door behind us. I was sick from the flood of adrenaline, anger, and fear, and I couldn’t imagine how fried Rachel’s senses were. I would have liked nothing better than to lay us both down, filth and all, and wrap myself around her until we fell into sleep.

But Rachel had been under Weapon X’s control for so long that I couldn’t do that. The look in her eyes alone… it was the same look that stared back at me every time I looked in a mirror, one too full of things better left unsaid, memories better left forgotten, and actions too horrific to accept, much less regret. I hustled her down to the infirmary beneath the mansion and I snagged Hank McCoy in the middle of one of his esoteric communions with the medical computer. I dropped my stolen hypodermic by his hand and explained in a few terse words what had happened. He was quick to put aside his arcane pursuits.

He’d only gotten started when Chuck came rummaging in my head. He wasn’t gentle about it, but I kept my body from telegraphing anything to Rachel.

_Logan, what have you done? Scott tells me that Rachel attacked –_

_She saved that bastard’s life,_ I snarled. _He’s a liar if he says anythin’ else._

Chuck held his temper as he started to reply, but not by much. I cut him off with a thought. _I’ll come up. Then we can have this out without draggin’ Rachel into it._

Mercifully, Chuck let that go, so I explained to Hank why I had to leave. I ran upstairs simmering, but I slammed a lid on it in case Rachel picked up my emotions.

“All right, I’m here, and let’s have it,” I growled as I strode into Chuck’s baronial library. Scott, Kurt, and Rogue slumped in chairs before Chuck’s big desk, and they turned to look at me. Scott’s jaw worked and he clenched the arms of his chair like he’d rather have his hands around my neck. “What’d you say Rachel did?”

“Calm down, Logan,” Chuck chided. “Please, sit down and let’s talk reasonably. We have two problems and we must work together to solve them. Apparently Rachel’s powers have expanded to include projection of emotions.”

“Looks like,” I agreed sullenly.

“And when she projected those emotions, she apparently inflicted them on everyone without discrimination –“

“Uh-uh,” I interrupted. “Most of the soldiers died outright. We got hit pretty hard, but not as hard as they did.”

“Perhaps so, Logan,” Chuck conceded with a hair of irritation. “Still, Jean was particularly hard hit.”

I nodded reluctantly and forced myself to relax. “True. How is Red?”

“She’s a mess,” Scott snarled. “Whatever Rachel did, Jean’s shielding gave her no protection, and she’s falling apart, Logan. She’s –”

“What do you want me to do, apologize?” I spat. “Okay, I’m sorry that Rachel didn’t find an easier way to stop that bullet from goin’ into your brain. Do you think I liked havin’ my wife’s death crammed into my head? Because that’s what Rachel projected, Scott – what Sabretooth forced on her!”

Scott had the grace to look shocked at my revelation, but he didn’t back down on his anger. I should’ve remembered that he cared for his lady as much as I did mine.

“She used the only thing she had, Scott. An untried talent. She didn’t target us on purpose, and she tried to ease the damage afterwards. What else do you want me to say?”

Scott started to sputter, but Chuck cut him off with a longsuffering expression and a hand. “I understand you’re angry on many levels, Logan –“

“Damn’ straight.”

He held up his hand again. “Bear with me, Logan. You don’t understand the severity of Jean’s situation. There are… other factors that make the aftereffects of Rachel’s projections difficult.”

I looked suspiciously at Scott. “What other factors?”

Chuck sighed. “Jean has… other powers that have had to be suppressed because they are too dangerous for her to control at this point. Rachel’s projections have disturbed the suppression of those powers –“

“She’s tearing herself apart!” Scott snarled.

“So is Rachel!” I spat back.

“Both of you stop it!” Rogue exclaimed. She exhaled in frustration. “Ah’m sorry, Professor, but these two roosters got their balls in this, and there ain’t no way to calm ‘em down but the hard way. So both of you listen to me!”

I glowered at Rogue, but did as she asked. “So you got the floor. What’re you gonna do with it?”

“Ah was there, Professor,” Rogue looked at Chuck. “There were a dozen soldiers on Logan and six on Scott, one about to shoot Scott in the head. Jean was out and Kurt and Ah weren’t able to do anything. So Rachel was the only one who could stop them from shootin’ Scott.”

“Thanks, sis,” I nodded.

“You’re welcome. But Jean’s hurtin’ too, Logan, and Ah know you care about her, so understand why Scott’s upset –”

“I don’t need you to make excuses for me, Rogue!” Scott snarled.

Rogue tossed her head. “Ah ain’t, Scott, so shut up and let me finish. Rachel had a detonator in her, Professor. Ah borrowed a little of Jean’s powers to help Logan take it out, so Jean’s in my head. It scared her when Rachel’s projection went past her screens, and she’s tearin’ herself up. We gotta figure out how to stop that, because she’s got stuff inside Ah didn’t know anyone could do.”

“Thank you Rogue,” Chuck nodded. “Can you tell us anything about why Rachel’s projections caused such an impact?”

Rogue ran her gloved hands tiredly through her tangled hair. “Rachel’s not a telepath, Professor. She’s an empath. She reads emotions; Jean reads thoughts. Two different things. It feels like Jean thought her thought blocks would be emotion blocks, too, and because they aren’t, she got scared.”

Chuck sighed. “Jean has always been tentative about her abilities. What you say makes sense, Rogue. Thank you for your insight. Scott, Logan, you must put your anger aside until we stabilize the situation for both Jean and Rachel.”

“Okay,” Scott said. His body was knotted with tension and even his ruby crystal visor couldn’t hide his fury when he looked at me. “But if anything happens to Jean –”

“Why don’t you take it out on Weapon X instead of Rachel?” I growled.

“Stop it, both of you!” Chuck snapped. It was rare that he put so much vehemence in his words. “This display is not only pointless, but dangerous –”

“At lot more than you think it is.” Hank McCoy let himself in the library. “Rachel’s talents have had to compensate for such massive amounts of drugs that they’re at high intensity. She’s picking up every emotion in the mansion, and they hurt her. She can’t keep from projecting uncontrollably, trying to protect herself from the onslaught.”

A wave of emotional pain swept through me – Rachel’s projection. The expressions on my friends’ faces told me they’d felt it, too.

“Like that,” Hank grimaced. “That’s feeding into Jean to make her problems worse, which feeds back to Rachel. The whole thing is escalating faster than I can stop it. Professor, I could use you down there to help with Jean.”

“I’ll come, too,” Scott said, rising hastily.

“Only if you control every scrap of emotion,” Hank warned. “You, too, Logan. Rachel’s not even sure whether she’s in a simulation or not. Both of you have to keep a lid on it, or it’ll be worse than pouring gasoline on a fire.”

“You got it,” I said as I followed the professor out. He and Scott headed for the lift down, and Hank and I ran for the stairs. “You got any idea what they dosed Rachel with?”

Hank cast me a look over his shoulder. “I’m working on it. Be thankful it wasn’t the stuff you brought back in the hypo. That’s a vicious piece of work with only one antidote, and that works only temporarily.”

“Meanin’ that she’d need access to the antidote for the rest of her life,” I surmised with a snarl. “One more way to own her, eh?”

Hank nodded. “ I’m hoping the residue of whatever they did inject might still be in her bloodstream, but I don’t have the results yet. Why?”

“In case we need to knock her out to stop the cascade.”

Hank nodded. “That’s what I thought. I hope the analysis will complete by the time we get down there. The professor isn’t kidding about what might happen if Jean loses control. If I can safely put Rachel to sleep for a while, that might help.”

I grimaced. Controlling my emotions was problematic at the best of times, but Hank’s grim visage told me I’d better learn. I damped down my irritation at Scott, my fury at Weapon X, my worry for Rachel and Jean, and tried to enter the infirmary as empty of emotion as I knew how. I guess I didn’t do a good job of it, because Rachel cowered in a corner, her hands over her ears, curled in on herself –

She wasn’t reacting to my emotions. As soon as I got close to her, I felt the sudden lightening of air pressure that had caused Rachel’s distress – Jean’s doing. The emotional reaction from Rachel came after it, but she quickly damped it, trying to turn the pain into calm. She succeeded briefly, but Hank was right about her exhaustion, and her efforts quickly weakened. As Hank went to his medical computer, I went to Rachel.

She reached for me, pulled me closer, inhaling to catch my scent. “Is this real? Are we out?”

“We’re out,” I assured her, grimacing as my ears popped painfully. “Jean’s not doin’ so well. You gotta stop projectin’, Rachel. It’s tearin’ her apart.”

“I’m trying. But her emotions hurt, and I don’t know how to stop my projections from trying to protect me –”

The floor under us bucked, and the air turned thick and acrid, difficult to breathe. On the heels of that was a wave of pain from Rachel. I looked at Hank, and he looked down at the hypodermic in his hand, then at Rachel.

I gathered Rachel into my arms and turned towards Hank so she didn’t see him with the needle.

“Hang on, darlin’,” I whispered in her ear. “Just hang on.”

She flinched as Hank shot the tranquilizer into her hip. Her eyes flared with that metallic silver fire and the air shrieked with her terror, but only until the drug coursed through her body. As the glow of her eyes faded and her terror died, I felt like the biggest betrayer since Judas.

“How long will she be out?” I growled.

Hank swallowed. “At least six hours. I thought we might need that long.”

I nodded as the floor buckled again. I put Rachel down on the medical cot. “Might. Let’s get a handle on Jean.”

“She’s locked herself in the other lab.”

I ran that way as the floor buckled a third time. I found Chuck and Scott outside the door, both of them panting.

“You can’t go in there,” Chuck gasped. “She’s phasing matter from one state to another –”

“I’m the only one who can go in there,” I snarled. “You got more of what you gave Rachel, Hank?”

Hank put the hypodermic into my hand without a word.

“Logan –” Scott snapped, but stifled himself.

I gave him a smirk. “Can’t help it if I’m always the guy who saves the girl, son.”

“Go to hell,” Scott snarled.

“’Spect I will. But not today. Today, I’m gonna do my best to save your lady.” I took a deep breath, another, then nodded to Hank. “Open the door.”

The air inside wasn’t breathable. Jean was on her hands and knees on the floor, sobbing at full tilt. I stepped inside and the door shut behind me. Her head swiveled around. Her eyes flamed orange, like embers in the heart of a furnace.

“What do you want?” Her voice didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard.

“I want to protect you,” I returned. “C’mon, Red. You’re tearin’ the world into pieces. You don’t need to do that.”

Things started to scramble, and my body started to dissolve. My healing factor fought to compensate. Jean put her hands to her head like it was going to explode. I edged closer, my free hand out to her.

“Darlin’, let it go. Rachel did the only thing she could do to save Scott from dyin’. She didn’t mean to hurt you. She’s asleep now. You know how to hold yourself together. Take a deep breath and let yourself settle.”

“I can’t!” Jean sobbed. “I can’t, Logan. There are too many things inside me, and I don’t know how to hold them!”

I was within a half meter of her. I eased down to my knees, fighting not to breathe the air Jean had turned into crap. The air pressure changed again, and my ears popped painfully. Jean felt it, too and moaned. Part of my body dissolved, but again my healing factor compensated. I touched her shoulder and eased her into my lap. She wrapped herself around me, never flinching until I stabbed Hank’s hypodermic into her hip and pushed the plunger in. Things were dicey for a second, rippling from one physical state to another before she lost consciousness, but while it hurt like hell, I stayed in one piece.

Things fell into normal. I got to my feet and carried Jean to the door. It opened without me asking, and I took a welcome, deep lungful of normal air. Then I put Jean in Scott’s arms. He took her without a word, but once she was in his arms, he met my eyes. Even with his crystal visor blocking sight of his eyes, I understood how much Jean’s distress hurt him.

“I’m sorry ‘bout Red,” I told him gruffly. “I’ll clear Rachel outa here, and maybe that’ll give you and Chuck some time.”

He swallowed, looked down at Jean, and nodded. He retreated with her to the infirmary.

“I’d like to borrow the Blackbird,” I asked Chuck. “I won’t bring Rachel back here.”

Chuck nodded quickly enough, but he didn’t meet my eyes. “I appreciate that, Logan.”

Given that his favorite student had just been carried away in pieces, I appreciated his restraint, but his dismissal was clear enough. I left him in the hallway without a backward glance.

By the time I reached the infirmary, Hank had sutured Rachel’s shrapnel wounds, then cleaned and bandaged everything. He’d also loaded a lot of bandages and medications into a bag, and he was hastily writing a list when I came in. He tucked the paper into the bag and handed it to me.

“I wrote down everything – antibiotics, pain management, dosages, frequency. The drugs they gave her – she’ll go through a nasty withdrawal for a couple of days. I’ve given you things to help with that. This lot ought to hold her for a few days. If you need more supplies, call, and I’ll get it to you.”

I picked Rachel up from her cot. “Appreciate it, Hank.”

Hank cast an anxious look at Jean lying nearby with Scott hovering over her. “Where can I reach you if I need to?”

“I’ll keep my cell on. If Red needs somethin’, just yell.”

Hank nodded. He glanced at Rachel. “Good luck.”

“You, too.”

I was about to board the Blackbird when Rogue ran after me with a bag. She was still in her uniform, and her face was still smudged with the grime of the fight. “Ah figured you’d wanna get her outa here. Ah packed up a bunch of your stuff for you.”

It was an unwritten rule that no one ever went in my room at the mansion except me or Rachel. Ever. Rogue knew that. I gave her a glower as we went up the gantry. Rogue opened the fold-down medical cot without my asking, then despite things she grinned.

“What’ll you give me not to tell Jubilee that your room ain’t the mess of beer cans and skin books she thinks it is?”

I belted Rachel onto the cot and kissed Rogue on the forehead quickly, not enough to hurt either of us. “It ain’t nice to discourage somebody’s imagination, kid.”

She put her arms akimbo. “She thinks you’re a drunk and a lech.”

“No, she doesn’t. Neither do you.”

She laughed tiredly and patted my arm. “Take care of both of you, bro.”

“Do my best,” I said as Rogue backed towards the gantry. “Thanks for the backup today. Tell the Elf and ‘Ro I said thanks, too. You wanna bail with us?”

She thought about it. “You know Scott’s gonna freak because of Jean. Ah’ll make sure he don’t trash you and Rachel too bad.”

“Appreciate it. Neither of us are gonna be welcomed back anytime soon.”

Rogue’s grin faded, replaced by regret. “That ain’t right, Logan.”

I shrugged. “Good luck the next few days.”

She nodded, and disappeared.

I headed for the pilot’s seat. Wouldn’t be the first time that a piece of my life ended up another dead end. Probably wouldn’t be the last, either.

 

* * *

 

_Two weeks later…_

 

So sue me for not getting back to this sooner. My healing factor doesn’t cover some things.

I musta written this part five times. All of ‘em crap. All of ‘em raw, messy, too like what came before.

Still don’t know how things are gonna turn out, anyway.

Bare recitation of the facts…

Daniel didn’t just hack into Weapon X’s power grid and blow the place to hell. He and his little beasties sucked their computers dry and left the husks to burn. All of the data ended up in Xavier’s hands. This time, the egghead used the evidence as ruthlessly as Magneto would have, and there was a big stink about the government’s misuse of power. Daniel stayed in the background, but I suspected that the geeky white boy got himself plugged into so many think tanks that he was set for life. I owed him.

Rogue, Kurt, Hank, and ‘Ro were good. So was Daniel. I know who my friends are.

Jean got her head back together. Guess it was painful. Humbling. Musta been more fear playing in her head than I figured, because I never heard from her. Rogue kept me posted.

I was still on Ol’ Red Eyes’ shit list. Guess you know how much that bothered me.

Xavier… didn’t hear from him, either. I didn’t care for myself, but I did for Rachel.

Rachel…

–

Damn. I’ve stared at this for another half hour trying to figure out what to say.

Can’t.

Back to the bare recitation of facts.

I took Rachel to the estate her parents had left her. It was in the middle of an empty twelve acres in upstate New York, so no one suffered her projections as she fought through two days of drug withdrawal. No one overloaded her fried empathic talents when she tried to make sense of what had happened. No one recoiled when she couldn’t learn how to control her projections…

Well, I was there. Hope I didn’t give her too much to hurt about. My healing factor meant she didn’t know what her projections could do.

I tried to be the samurai Rachel called me, even when she told me what she’d been through. Her words might’ve been quiet, but what she projected was so complex that I couldn’t sort it out. She was past crying, past protesting, past thinking she’d ever recover a normal life. She wasn’t going to join the Foreign Legion, and she wasn’t going to be the assassin they’d taught her to be… but she was never going to be an antiques dealer again, either. Just where she did fit was a losing proposition that I knew too much about. It bothered me that she kept those dog tags around her neck.

Once she figured out that I felt her projections and they could hurt, she asked me what her range was, asked me to stay in the house, then took herself outside and not so quietly howled at the universe. Maybe her sense of distance was off, because when her emotions flooded me it was all I could do not to get on the hog, head to Washington, and turn the bones of the people who’d funded that Weapon X facility into a monument to why it was a bad idea to piss me off. I can’t find words for the rage I felt to see my woman scarred with needle marks and surgical incisions and weals and bruises, her spirit no less scourged, her eyes nothing but black pits with a netherworld light in their depths that only another Weapon X experiment understood –

Gotta keep a lid on it.

Dunno that my presence helped. Maybe I provided moral support. Maybe all I provided was the model of how fucked over she was.

Maybe I was a jerk to think that Xavier should’ve offered her help, but the egghead stayed silent. Rachel took the snub in silence but her emotions betrayed her, telling me that she accepted it as deserved. I didn’t like that.

Who helped was Daniel. He was on Rogue’s good side. When he found out from her what had happened, he set his little beasties loose over the net. He got a line on a Zen monk in Japan who understood Rachel’s new talent, and who could teach her the control she couldn’t find on her own.

After Daniel and I vetted the monk, we got Rachel, drugged to the gills but walking, to the airport, and onto one of her parents’ company jets, which flew the three of us to Sapporo. The monk had sent a representative, a tall, thoughtful man named Keshe who damped Rachel’s projections. Daniel did all the work getting contact names and email addresses and such. All I did was keep Rachel upright and myself from snarling. I didn’t want to leave her here, even though her empathy worked well enough to tell her that the monk was on the level. She didn’t want me to go. But she needed to learn control, and with my protective emotions all over the place, I guess I didn’t help.

Outside the airport at the cabstand, Rachel hugged Daniel like she didn’t expect to see him again, which didn’t help his red eyes look any better. He wrapped those long, mountain climber arms of his around her, hugged her hard, then retreated down the sidewalk to give me a minute to say my own good-bye. The monk didn’t back off, given that he had to stay close to Rachel to block her projections, but he turned his back to offer the semblance of privacy.

“Don’t like this, darlin’,” I shook my head.

Rachel’s glassy eyes met mine with an otherworldly stare, but her scent told me what she felt. “I know, Logan. But I’ve got to manage this wonderful new talent that can kill people. I will figure out what the equivalent is of Scott’s visor that’ll let me control myself. And I will find the equivalent of Rogue’s gloves to keep me from being bombarded by everyone’s mood.”

She turned away. Before I could muster another protest, she turned those damned haunted eyes on me.

“Logan, you know those nightmares you have? The ones I have?”

“One and the same.”

She nodded agreement. “We’ve been lucky that neither of us have had one since… this. If we had, I’m not sure what I’d do without wanting to. You could get hurt in a way even your healing factor might not be able to fix. And that would be something I’d never recover from. I have to learn control.”

“How long’s that gonna take?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I have no idea. But once I have control, you’ll be the first person I call. We agreed that we’d back each other up. So I promise I’ll call the first second I can.”

I didn’t have any counter to that, and Rachel fumbled to put her arms around me as if she weren’t sure I’d let her. “I don’t want you to go, Logan. But remember when you left me when you didn’t want to? Because you said you didn’t want to watch me die? I don’t want to watch that happen to you, either, and at my hands. Please give me the time, Logan. Promise me.”

I held her and kissed her hair. It wasn’t much consolation for leaving her, but at least the needle marks on her arms had faded. Even the tattooed number was gone. So she was healing. Maybe this monk would help with the internal wounds as Daniel hoped.

“I promise, darlin’. Though I hate like hell havin’ to.”

“I know.”

She kissed me, but backed off quickly.

“Go. Before I can’t hold this back,” she whispered, her eyes glistening.

I kissed her lips quickly, and headed after Daniel. I hadn’t taken two steps towards Daniel before the air trembled with loss. From his wince, he felt it just as painfully as I did. I looked behind me, and the monk was beside Rachel, her emotions fading as he took her arm and led her to a car.

I followed Daniel back into the airport, my own emotions in no better control. I hoped they didn’t hurt her too much before I got out of range.

 

* * *

 

_Two months later…_

 

As hard as it was, I kept my promise to Rachel. I didn’t call; I didn’t head back to Sapporo. I went about my business with as much ill temper as I ever did. I spent time with Daniel, got a line on a couple of the guys who hadn’t been inclined to heed the lesson delivered in Chicago, and dealt with them. Probably didn’t endear me to Xavier, but I didn’t give a shit what he thought.

I heard from Rogue that Jean had found her way back to balance. Daniel and Rogue and Kurt and ‘Ro did a lot of lobbying at the mansion, and eventually Xavier saw fit to regret ostracizing Rachel. I guess I understood – here was the world’s most powerful mutant, and a kid younger than his two golden-haired children had manifested something they didn’t know how to guard against. That surprise, that vulnerability, made all three of them real uncomfortable. Still… I was in no hurry to see them.

I kept busy. I did a couple of jobs. I stayed out of Weapon X’s way. They stayed out of mine. Days went by. I stopped by Rachel’s parents’ house because Daniel was out there taking care of some routine maintenance, and Rogue had tagged along. They were both happy to see me, and for a couple of hours we had some laughs. After the past months, it was good to share a dinner with friends. We polished off a few beers before packing it in for the night.

The next morning, my cell rang while I was still in bed. No caller ID, but that was clue enough. Maybe knowing wasn’t so good, because my voice was a lot gruffer than I wanted when I answered.

“Hiya, darlin’.”

“Hello, Logan. How are you?” she asked softly.

“No better, no worse. Miss you. You doin’ okay?”

There was a long pause. “I’m… quieter.”

“The coverts leavin’ you alone?”

“Yes. You?”

“Yup.”

A long silence passed.

I exhaled. “Y’know, kid, this ain’t gonna work if neither of us talk.”

I heard a pale chuckle. “I guess not. I’m not used to it these days.”

“Never been my strong suit. Lot easier to see you face-to-face and let you pick up stuff on your own.”

She heard the questions I didn’t ask, but she chose not to answer them. “I’m in a safe place. For now.”

I winced at Rachel’s tentativeness. “Good,” I lied. I wanted her with me, not half a world away.

“I’m sorry for everything, Logan,” she blurted. “I –”

“Don’t be sorry,” I growled, then cursed myself silently. “Dammit, Rachel, I’m shit at dancin’ around stuff. What’d you call for?”

“Because I promised you I would. I’m learning how control the projections, to direct them properly so I don’t hurt my friends. I’m sorry I hurt you and the other X-Men. Kurt should never have had to bear what I projected. Or any of you. Especially you.”

“Listen, kid, I owe you a bigger apology than you owe anybody.”

Seconds went by. “I don’t blame you for anything, Logan. I should’ve looked out for things better, too. But… we both know why neither of us did. I just... wish I hadn’t added to your burden about Silver Fox.”

“You want to atone for that, I got some things you can do. But it’s gotta be in person.”

Silence again. “I’m afraid of that, Logan.”

“I know you are.”

“Not because of us. Because… people track us and… worse.”

“There’s ways around that, darlin’.”

More silence. “I just wanted you to know that I’m okay. How’s Jean?”

I shrugged even though Rachel couldn’t see me. “From what I hear, back to normal. I’m still persona non grata at the Institute. But Xavier’s sorry about how they treated you.”

“I understand why he’s angry, Logan. I hurt innocent people. He didn’t do anything to me.”

“Bullshit, Rachel,” I growled. “You didn’t know how to target your projections when you saved Ol’ Red Eyes from a bullet. They oughta grow up about it.”

A soft chuckle. “I think it’ll be a while before I test their forgiveness, Logan.”

I snorted. “Ain’t easy for anybody when a developin’ mutant shows up an established one. But it’s harder for powerful ones because they get complacent. A little humility’s been good for ‘em.”

“Maybe so, but I didn’t enjoy being their introduction to the sensation.”

I didn’t have anything to add to that, and Rachel didn’t break the long silence that followed.

“Anything else?” I asked, hating myself for the anger in my voice. I wanted more than a voice over the phone. Rachel didn’t get that, because the silence over the phone was long.

“All the things you and I both know,” she finally said. “Where are you?”

She had gotten it. I grimaced, softened my voice. “At your parents’ house with Daniel and Rogue, takin’ care of your furnace. We cleaned up after ourselves. We won’t be here but another day or so.”

“I appreciate you all taking care of things for me. Maybe… I can call you again before you leave.”

“Knock yourself out, kid.”

“Good-bye, Logan.”

“Darlin’ –”

“Yes?” she said very quickly.

Now it was me indulging in long pauses. “See ya. One day.”

She rang off.

I spent the rest of the day and most of the night outside, chopping wood, trying to burn off… lots of things. When I finally dragged my sorry ass into bed, I didn’t sleep. When I finally did sleep, I had too many nightmares to find any rest. It was late Thursday morning when I finally gave up. I showered, pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt that I didn’t bother to button, and padded barefoot to the kitchen to scrounge breakfast. I had my face full of pork chops and sausage when Rogue wandered in.

“Hey, bro,” she drawled. She got a bottle of juice out of the fridge and poured herself a glass, eyeing my disheveled state as she did so. “Late night, sugah?”

I grunted and kept chewing. Rogue and I have known each other too long to be polite to each other when we didn’t feel up to it.

Rogue slid into the chair opposite me despite all the signals to leave me alone. “She called you yesterday.”

I hadn’t mentioned Rachel’s call. Then again, when I spent as much time laying waste with an ax as I had yesterday, it hadn’t been hard for Rogue to guess why. I shot her a look over my plate but stuck to my chewing.

“What’re you gonna do about it?”

I swallowed and glared at Rogue with enough heat to fry a lesser mutant, but my kid sister in all but blood just sipped her juice and returned my gaze as bold as brass.

I went back to my sausage. “Leave it alone, Rogue.”

She swirled her glass. “Boy, you are in a snit, sugah. It wouldn’t hurt you to be polite. There might be somethin’ in it for you.”

“What?” I growled.

She was bratty enough to take a long drink of juice before she deigned to answer. “There’s a Next Day Air envelope on the table by the door for you. Came early this mornin’. If you’da been polite, Ah’da gotten it for you so you could finish your breakfast, but no, you gotta snarl like a bayou wildcat with a big ol’ gar up his butt –”

I didn’t hear the rest. I headed for the table by the front door. Sure enough, there was a red and white envelope with my name on it.

Rogue ambled after me as I slit the envelope open. Inside were details of a private jet leaving La Guardia tonight at eleven, the name of a Japanese shuttle service, and a fake name. There was nothing personal attached, but there didn’t need to be. I sheathed my claw, put the information in my shirt pocket, thrust the empty envelope into Rogue’s hands, and headed back to the kitchen.

“What?” Rogue asked the ceiling and tossed the envelope back onto the table before she trailed after me. By the time she got to the kitchen, I’d downed the rest of my chops and shoveled the plate into the sink. “Must be some kinda emergency. Hey, where you goin’?”

“Out,” I barked. “You gotta problem with that?”

She held up her hands as I rounded on her. “No, no way, bro. Just askin’.”

I glared at her as I headed upstairs. She was still standing there ten minutes later when I bolted down the stairs two at a time with my duffel and the katana box holding Rachel’s gift blades. Daniel was there as well, wearing nothing but a pair of ratty Mackenzie tartan boxers, his wiry white hair sticking out at all angles. He absent-mindedly scratched his unshaven chin. As scruffy as he looked, Rogue had probably yanked him out of bed with all of the finesse she reserved for her friends.

Rogue glanced at Daniel scratching and rolled her eyes. “Guess you’ll be gone for a while, sugah.”

“The two of you can handle the furnace repairman by yourselves.”

Daniel stretched until a handful of vertebrae cracked and folded his long arms over his bare chest. He leaned against the doorjamb and didn’t crack a smile. “Tell my sma sister that we said hello.”

“You’re both damn’ nosy.”

“You’re still a bayou wildcat with a big ol’ gar up his butt,” Rogue snarked.

“You said that already. You runnin’ outa insults?”

“That one fits you too well not to use it more’n once.”

I cracked a grin and tugged the streak of white that marked the front of Rogue’s long mane. “Maybe it does. Take care, sis.”

“You, too, bro.”

I tapped fists with Daniel. “See ya, geek.”

“You, too, gnat.”

I was on the bike and down the road in less time than it takes to say it.

Twenty-seven hours later, I’d made my way on a private jet from New York’s JFK via LA and Hong Kong to the Shin-Chitose Airport near Sapporo. I found the shuttle service, gave them the fake name, and found myself in an off-road jeep being driven towards the mountains on a rough, two-lane road full of ice ruts. It was afternoon, overcast, cold, and the clouds threatened snow. Two hours went by without a word.

Somewhere on that deserted road, the jeep stopped. I got out.

The road curved around the mountain, so the jeep disappeared quickly. The sound of the motor didn’t last much longer. The road was the sole break in the forest, and the trees extended above me towards the peak as well as below me towards an unseen valley. Snow had just started to fall and there was no wind, no sense of bird or animal. The cold hugged me in near silence. After the tedious hours of being crammed in an airplane, even a fancy private one, then bombarded by the noise and the hassle of airports, the quiet under the trees was balm. I stood still and let it soak in.

Once I’d settled, I heard her approach from uphill. A moment later, I caught her scent. She came through the trees quietly and stood at the edge of the road, still within the forest. She wore hiking boots and jeans, a down coat and mittens. She took off her black fur hat shielding her from the snow, revealing her raven hair as silky and as glossy as I remembered. The silver light in her eyes was faint, banked, but it didn’t mask that trace of wildness, wariness, inhuman awareness that had blossomed back in the states, the look of an animal who’d learned to mistrust humanity.

Before I could mourn, she smiled, and the wild light faded behind her warmth. I slung my duffel over my shoulder, hefted my sword box, and crossed the road.

 

# # #


End file.
